What Gymnast Nadia Comăneci's Perfect 10 Meant to Me

Romanian gymnast Nadia Comăneci made history at the 1976 Olympics by earning the first-ever perfect score of “10” for her performance in the uneven bars competition. It is now legend that the scoreboard that day lacked the technical capacity to display the number because a perfect score was considered unattainable—it lit up “1.00.” Comaneci racked up six additional perfect 10s, emerging as the darling of those Games. The media began referring to her by first name alone. And I, an eight year old boy growing up in Montreal, where the Games were being held, became obsessed with her.

I’d never seen anyone communicate so lucidly with their body as this otherworldly 14 year-old. Though I had never really been seriously interested in gymnastics, I started practicing somersaults, handstands, splits. I turned the wrought-iron bannister in my house into a horizontal bar and hung upside down in crazy contortions. In my small, safe, untroubled family life, this sudden passion went unquestioned.

“Nadia’s Theme,” the instrumental song renamed in her honor, shot up the charts. (Depending on which generation you belong to, you might recognize it as either the signature tune to the daytime drama, “The Young and the Restless,” or the sample behind Mary J. Blige’s “No More Drama.”) I insisted on getting the record, which I would play while wearing a pair of long johns meant to imitate Nadia’s leotard and performing a hodgepodge of her routines. On occasion, I persuaded friends or family members to watch my performance, giving them sheets of paper with “10” written on them to hold up at the end. Most of the time, the only available and willing judge was my mother. Phone in the crook of her neck, stirring a bowl, she never failed to flash that 10 right on cue.

At the close of the ’76 Olympics, Nadia returned to Romania, which for 13 more years remained under Communist rule and a dictatorship that took a revolution to overthrow. What did I comprehend of the political forces that shaped Nadia? Left with her Olympic memory, I gleefully carried on executing my Parkour-esque gymnastics—leaping from my second-floor bedroom window into backyard snowbanks to the applause of neighbor kids.

“Are you trying to be the next Bart Conner?” someone asked me—pointing to the American Olympian gymnast who would become Nadia’s husband after she defected from Romania in 1989. Far from it. Nadia got her first coaches—the legendary (problematic) husband-and-wife team of Béla and Márta Károlyi — in kindergarten. Even if I’d wanted to follow her path, I was years too late.

But Nadia showed me a more holistic way of expressing myself. She started me thinking about how and why society partitions body from mind, desire from reason, essence from expectation. That old Cartesian mind-body dualism—“I think therefore I am”—did a number on all of us, no matter which census boxes we grew up to tick. Early on, I was aware that as a Black child I’d be assumed more physically than intellectually capable, so I pushed my intellect. But I also had to minimize the risk of being painted the sports-averse queer weakling. Nadia mania felt like a moratorium on all that. I, a Black gay boy growing up in a Western democracy, glimpsed transcendence in a little white girl from behind the Iron Curtain.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was not alone in this belief. Some 375 miles to the south, in New York City—my home since the 90s—she was simultaneously influencing an entire culture. When I learned of the New York ball culture, I immediately knew. Ballroom, or the ball culture, captured in the 1990 documentary, Paris is Burning, by filmmaker Jennie Livingston, is an elaborate circuit of Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ chosen families known as “houses,” many of whose members were cast aside by their biological families for being gay or transgender. The houses compete against one another in a multitude of categories of drag performance for titles and trophies before panels of judges. The genius of ball culture is that it snatches elements from other worlds to construct meaning on its own.

So it was with Nadia’s perfect-10 score: It got adopted into the culture, as viewers familiar with the television series Pose, Legendary, or RuPaul’s Drag Race, all inspired by the ball universe, are aware. “We remember or pay homage to Nadia Comăneci by using the term in our categories, ‘10s, 10s, 10s across the board,’” says Junior LaBeija, a veteran master of ceremonies, well-known for the witty monologues he delivers in Paris is Burning. “That means that you are legendary, iconic, a statement, up-and-coming.”

There were other levels to her influence, as well. Nadia’s nationality evoked a sense of affinity in the Black and brown members of the ball community, who still felt themselves to be second-class citizens in the democratic West. “Romania was at the bottom of the list in comparison to America, Britain, France and all the other countries that presented potential winners,” said LaBeija. “When Nadia did become number 1, that was a catalyst, emotionally, for us of the ballroom culture to see the underdog achieve the pinnacle of success.”

But beyond symbolism, the same thing that drew me to Nadia attracted practitioners of the ball culture. “Gymnastics is a more natural form of what is now today called voguing,” explains LaBeija (on whom the Pose character “Pray Tell,” played by Billy Porter, is based), referring to the acrobatic dance form conceived in the ball culture. “When you think about the body stretches, the extensions, the ability to twirl or contort the body, ‘Vogue with a twist,’ ‘Butch queen in vogue,’ ‘Pop, dip and spin,’ ‘duckwalk,’”—classic categories and techniques of the form—“you have to look back at Nadia Comăneci’s performance.”

One of Nadia’s signature moves in her floor-exercise routine was a sassy trot with limp-wristed hands flopping—it looked like an upright duckwalk. Thinking back to my childhood, it was her only technique I wasn’t brave enough to imitate, even though it would have been simpler for me to pull off than her elaborate bar or tumbling routines. I was afraid doing it would reveal too much about me, even if I recognized in it some hint of a culture I was bound to find.

Nicholas Boston is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the City University of New York, Lehman College.