Photo: Nadia Comaneci, 1976, credit agerpres archives via Wikimedia Commons
Though 50 years have passed, I remember the excitement of watching 14-year-old Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci score the first perfect ten in Olympic gymnastics at the 1976 Montreal Games. She would go on to earn six more perfect scores that year.
What I remember most, beyond the awe, was a conversation with my parents about what Comaneci may have had to endure for that kind of perfection. Now I have the vocabulary I didn’t have then. A life can be authored by more than one voice: the person’s own will, a coach’s direction, a state’s requirement for a symbol.
Accounts of Romania’s training system at the time describe young gymnasts kept isolated and closely monitored. While Comaneci’s routines were astoundingly flawless, what that flawlessness required of her is hard to know. Her defection from Romania in 1989 and what came after reads like a different kind of authorship: a life in Oklahoma with fellow Olympian Bart Conner, a business they built together, and decades of work as an ambassador for Special Olympics and international gymnastics.
Whatever may have been imposed on her, and whatever she wanted for herself, to this day I find her life remarkable.