Saturday 21 July 2012

Nadia Comăneci

What a pleasure to see Nadia Comăneci again, the first Olympic girl gymnast to score a 10. She did so on the uneven bars in the 1976 Summer Olympiad in Montreal. I was entranced by her assured performance. CLICK for a YouTube video. CLICK for her gymnastics record on Wikipedia. What better person could there be to carry the Olympic flame in London? Here she is on top of the North Greenwich Arena with John Amaechi. CLICK for a BBC interview.

2 Comments:

At 22/7/12, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Yes it is wonderful to see some of the all time greats here in London. The scoreboards at Montreal, weren't equipped to handle the perfect 10, even though, she had scored them before and was a European champion. She was matched by fellow Romanian, Daniela Silivas at the 1988 Olympics, when she too was awarded 4 perfect 10s on the bars, the maximum for a piece of apparatus. The personalities do seem to have gone, like the Korbuts, Silivases, Comanecis, Kims and Shushonovas. Today it's too acrobatically based and not enough gymnastics and dance.

 
At 22/7/12, Blogger Unknown said...

And the IOC has raised the age limit too, which doesn't help.

 

Post a Comment

<< Home