Nadia Comaneci: “Mistakes give you creativity”
The impact of Comaneci’s perfect marks had the very practical change of mandating scoreboards capable of displaying 10.00.
The ones used in Montreal, quite famously now, could only display three digits, forcing Comaneci’s historic scores to be shown as simply 1.00.
But beyond the technology, Comaneci’s arrival changed the sport.
The lithe Romanian surely had her ‘Nadia touch’ that set her apart, but she also had elements no other gymnast could achieve, including the Comaneci salto – a kip to straddled front somersault re-grab on the uneven bars.
It’s an element so difficult that it still bears an ‘E’ rating in the sports’ Code of Points.
It’s also something that came about accidentally, Comaneci says.
“By mistake,” she says of how she came up with the skill. “You’re making mistakes, you invented something.”
The five-time Olympic champion says that one time while she was attempting a straddled flip from the low bar to the high bar, she hit her heels and caught the lower bar by mistake.
“My coach said, ‘That’s very interesting. Do you think you can do that on the high bar and move it up?’” Comaneci recalls. “I’m like, ‘No, because I’m going to hit my heels.’ So, we wrapped my heals with foam, because I was hitting them all the time until I figured out what’s the good technique to avoid hitting my heels all the time.
“Mistakes give you a creativity and make you go somewhere that… ‘Oh, that’s something that the body has done before. Let’s try it,’” she concluded.
Comaneci’s groundbreaking acrobatics and style pushed the sport to new heights.
“I wasn’t quite aware in Montreal because once gymnastics was over, we didn’t stay through the end of the Olympics,” she says. “So, it didn’t sink in with me until we got home.
“Even now, I’m looking back – it’s almost a half century ago – and I’m thinking that the 14-year-old [version of me]the courage, the craziness and determination, I look at that 14-year-old like it’s not me.”