Perfect Nadia a superstar even today

Wearing seven-inch black stilettos, skinny jeans and a black figure-hugging T-shirt declaring “I’m Gold”, Nadia Comaneci was still turning heads in London 36 years after producing the defining image of Olympic gymnastics.

Yet the Romanian’s fashion designer had missed a trick.

“(It says) I’m gold... but it should have had ‘I’m perfect” on the back,” she said dissolving into laughter as she looked down on the bold gold lettering in the front of her T-shirt.
She was spot on.  “People don’t remember how many medals I won, all they remember is the history and the 1.00,” she added.

That 1.00 signified the first perfect 10 achieved at an Olympics -- in Montreal in 1976.
The then 14-year-old’s soaring performance on the asymmetric bars was so exceptionally good, and so unexpected, that a scoreboard had yet to be devised that could record such perfection.

So officials flashed up ‘1.00’.  “I didn’t understand what that meant,” Comaneci, 50, said on Wednesday. “That’s all they could show. I was a little frustrated at the beginning because I thought I did better than one.”

She certainly did.

Her groundbreaking moment spurred hundreds of pixie Nadia clones to chase perfection.  However, a judging scandal at the 2004 Olympics robbed future generations from experiencing the giddy heights of perfection.