when Maylis de Kerangal remembers Nadia Comaneci – L’Express

“I remember very precisely the moment when she appeared in front of the asymmetrical bars, under the lights of the Forum, the construction of which was beginning to be unfinished. The white leotard with the V-neck, the white slippers, the clumsy little bangs, the protruding shoulder blades under the elastic fabric. And on its back, the number 73, like a golden number.

I remember his first movement as a feeling of dizziness, an initial apnea. My heartbeat is speeding up, I have a lump in my throat and my legs feel like cotton. My eyes struggle to follow it, to decompose these figures which follow one another without pause, fluid, ample, ultra-rapid. She moves above, between and below the bars, forwards, backwards, pelvis high, arms thin and toes outstretched. Its arch apostrophes the world until the final angel’s leap. Beauty in person.

I remember as if it were yesterday the presenters babbling, their comments reduced to flat exclamations – oh, look at this, she’s moving well! Of their mad astonishment. Yet she is no stranger: a year earlier, she won gold on all apparatus except floor at the European Championships. But no one in Montreal, not even the judges, was prepared to see something so prodigious, a movement which suddenly no longer has anything to do with mere perfection, academic excellence, but is about something else entirely. , comes from grace.

His courage and my fear

I remember with a sinking heart the two-tone ribbon moving in her little ponytail, the only trace of indiscipline on this strict, refined, controlled body. A body that I do not know, which is neither that of a little girl, nor that of a woman, nor even that, overflowing, awkward, transitory, of an adolescent girl. He overthrows the established order, he makes a revolution. It hybridizes childhood and power. This body is the event.

I remember that she barely blinked in front of the luminescent sticks which formed the numbers 1.00, the Longines scoreboards not being calibrated to display a 10.00. She doesn’t seem so impressed by this score that no one before her has achieved in an Olympic competition. She has already moved on to something else, already somewhere else. On the beam. Where she arrogates to herself the same perfect tenin a stadium where 17,000 people applaud wildly, standing up, the big crash. […]

I tremble to remember his courage and my fear. Fear of her falling, fear that she will break and be punished. Fear of his imposing trainer, Béla Karoly, broad chested, big arms. His passages on the balance beam, above all, panic and amaze me. Under its little celestial feet, we forget that the apparatus measures 10 centimeters wide. Double back flip flap, somersault without hands, Valdez, side twist: she walks on water.

I still remember his composure on the balance beam. Up there, nothing seems to be able to disturb her, hinder her movement, compromise the accomplishment of her program, what she came to do here, in Montreal. A determination that highlights her solitude: up there on the beam, she is the only one of her species, she is unique in the world. I remember its mystery. In that summer of 1976, she is what happened to me. Nadia Comaneci.”

Taken from I remember… Pérec’s stride (and other sporting madeleines), directed by Benoît Heimermann. Threshold, 226 p., €19.90.