This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to This Day in History Class, a show that proves it's never too late or too early to make history. I'm Gabe Lucier, and today we're gearing up for this year's Summer Games by looking back at the flawless performance a fourteen year old Olympic gymnast Nadia Komenetch. The day was July eighteenth, nineteen seventy six. Romanian athlete Nadia Komenech became the first female gymnast in Olympic history to score a ten for her performance. She earned the perfect score while competing on the uneven bars at the Summer Olympics in Montreal, Canada, and if that weren't impressive enough, she then went on to record six more perfect tens that year, the most ever awarded to a single athlete at the same Olympic Games. At the time and in the year since, many outlets around the world reported that Nadia had scored the first ten ever in Olympic history, but that's not actually the case. While she was the first female gymnast to nab a perfect score and the first athlete to score a ten with an uneven bar's routine. She wasn't the first overall. That honor belongs to Albert Segeine of France, who at the nineteen twenty four Games in Paris, scored a ten on the side horse vault, an event that was permanently dropped after that single year. Women's gymnastics didn't become an official Olympic sport until nineteen twenty eight, when the first female Olympic gymnasts competed at the Summer Games in Amsterdam. Since then, it's become one of the most popular and fiercely competitive sports in the entire program. That was already the case in November of nineteen sixty one, when Nadia Elena Komenech was born in the small town of Onnesty, Romania. She started practicing gymnastics when she was five years old and displayed a natural skill for turning cartwheels. One year later, renowned gymnastics coach Bella Coroli saw Nadia practicing in the school yard and offered to train her for competitions. Under his instruction, Nadia went on to win title after title, including the Romanian National Junior Championships, the European Championships, and the American Cup all by the time she was thirteen years old. Those hard won victories helped prepare Nadia for the most daunting challenge of her young career, representing her nation at the nineteen seventy six Summer Olympics. She was just fourteen years old when she went to Montreal, which made the performance she delivered all the more astonishing. Nadia took to the floor on July eighteenth, nineteen seventy six, during the women's artistic gymnastics competition. Artistic gymnastics consists of a number of individual competitions and a team competition involving different apparatus that require different skills. Women compete across the vault, the uneven bars, the balance beam, and floor exercise, and the gymnasts to compete in all of these events are known as all around athletes. Nadia was an all around gymnast, and she earned her first perfect score during her uneven bars routine. You've probably seen that apparatus before. It's essentially a pair of parallel wooden bars fixed at different heights from the floor and supported by a steel frame. Moves on the bars include circles, turns, transitions, and releases, and each routine must include at least one transition from the high bar to the low bar, one move releasing and catching the same bar, one three hundred and sixty degree turn, and two grips or hand positions. Like all events in gymnastic competition, a strong showing on the uneven bars requires tremendous strength, agility, coordination, and precision. You have to demonstrate an awful lot of skills in just a thirty second routine, and according to the judges, Nadia nail them all. Her flawless performance was so unexpected that the scoreboard wasn't even capable of displaying it. The manufacturer had been under the impression that a ten point double zero score wasn't possible, so the board was only designed to display three digits like nine point five to two, for example. It couldn't display Nadia's true four digit score, so it just read one point zero zero instead. It was probably jarring for the athlete to see what appeared to be a low score, but I bet she got used to the site by the end of the games. That's because Nadias scored six more perfect tens at Montreal, three more on the uneven bars and another three on the balance beam. She took home three gold medals, two one for the uneven bars, another for the balance beam, and a third for the individual all around. She also won a bronze medal for the floor exercise and a silver as part of the team all around. These wins made her the youngest ever Olympic Gymnastics all around champion, and since the age eligibility requirement has since been raised to at least sixteen, it's a record that will never be broken. Nadia's streak of perfect tens would also be hard to replicate today. That's because gymnastic routines at the Olympics are no longer evaluated with a maximum of ten points. Beginning in two thirds er thousand and five, the mode of scoring changed to a two part system, a D score based on the difficulty and content of the exercise, and an E score grading D execution. These two numbers are then combined to get a final score, which is generally greater than ten. So while it's still theoretically possible to score a perfect ten for execution at the time of recording, that's yet to happen and maybe it never will. As for Nadia herself, she didn't let her perfect performance go to her head. She went right back to training harder than ever, and in nineteen eighty she secured another two gold medals for herself at the Olympics in Moscow, one for the balance beam and another for floor exercise. The following year was a bit of an outlier for Nadia. First, she announced her retirement from competitive gymnastics at the top of her game, and then, while on tour in the United States, her longtime coaches Bella and Marta Caroli defected from communist Romania. Romania's government cracked down hard on the gymnast from then on, severely restricting her travel to Western countries and placing her under almost constant supervision. After eight years of this harsh treatment, Nadia was able to escape her government minders and illegally crossed the border into Hungary. From there, she slowly made her way to the United States, where she was able to build a new life for herself as a gymnastics coach, author, and model. She also met and eventually married fellow gymnast Bart Connor, and together they opened a successful gymnastics studio for teenagers, which they still operate to this day. I'm Gay bluesiay, and hopefully you now know a little more about history today than you did yesterday. If you'd like to keep up with the show, you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at TDI HC Show, and if you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to send them my way by writing to This Day at iHeartMedia dot com. Thanks to Casby Bias for producing the show, and thanks to you for listening. I'll see you back here again tomorrow for another day in History class.

This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to This Day in History Class, a show that proves it's never too late or too early to make history. I'm Gabe Lucier, and today we're gearing up for this year's Summer Games by looking back at the flawless performance a fourteen year old Olympic gymnast Nadia Komenetch. The day was July eighteenth, nineteen seventy six. Romanian athlete Nadia Komenech became the first female gymnast in Olympic history to score a ten for her performance. She earned the perfect score while competing on the uneven bars at the Summer Olympics in Montreal, Canada, and if that weren't impressive enough, she then went on to record six more perfect tens that year, the most ever awarded to a single athlete at the same Olympic Games. At the time and in the year since, many outlets around the world reported that Nadia had scored the first ten ever in Olympic history, but that's not actually the case. While she was the first female gymnast to nab a perfect score and the first athlete to score a ten with an uneven bar's routine. She wasn't the first overall. That honor belongs to Albert Segeine of France, who at the nineteen twenty four Games in Paris, scored a ten on the side horse vault, an event that was permanently dropped after that single year. Women's gymnastics didn't become an official Olympic sport until nineteen twenty eight, when the first female Olympic gymnasts competed at the Summer Games in Amsterdam. Since then, it's become one of the most popular and fiercely competitive sports in the entire program. That was already the case in November of nineteen sixty one, when Nadia Elena Komenech was born in the small town of Onnesty, Romania. She started practicing gymnastics when she was five years old and displayed a natural skill for turning cartwheels. One year later, renowned gymnastics coach Bella Coroli saw Nadia practicing in the school yard and offered to train her for competitions. Under his instruction, Nadia went on to win title after title, including the Romanian National Junior Championships, the European Championships, and the American Cup all by the time she was thirteen years old. Those hard won victories helped prepare Nadia for the most daunting challenge of her young career, representing her nation at the nineteen seventy six Summer Olympics. She was just fourteen years old when she went to Montreal, which made the performance she delivered all the more astonishing. Nadia took to the floor on July eighteenth, nineteen seventy six, during the women's artistic gymnastics competition. Artistic gymnastics consists of a number of individual competitions and a team competition involving different apparatus that require different skills. Women compete across the vault, the uneven bars, the balance beam, and floor exercise, and the gymnasts to compete in all of these events are known as all around athletes. Nadia was an all around gymnast, and she earned her first perfect score during her uneven bars routine. You've probably seen that apparatus before. It's essentially a pair of parallel wooden bars fixed at different heights from the floor and supported by a steel frame. Moves on the bars include circles, turns, transitions, and releases, and each routine must include at least one transition from the high bar to the low bar, one move releasing and catching the same bar, one three hundred and sixty degree turn, and two grips or hand positions. Like all events in gymnastic competition, a strong showing on the uneven bars requires tremendous strength, agility, coordination, and precision. You have to demonstrate an awful lot of skills in just a thirty second routine, and according to the judges, Nadia nail them all. Her flawless performance was so unexpected that the scoreboard wasn't even capable of displaying it. The manufacturer had been under the impression that a ten point double zero score wasn't possible, so the board was only designed to display three digits like nine point five to two, for example. It couldn't display Nadia's true four digit score, so it just read one point zero zero instead. It was probably jarring for the athlete to see what appeared to be a low score, but I bet she got used to the site by the end of the games. That's because Nadias scored six more perfect tens at Montreal, three more on the uneven bars and another three on the balance beam. She took home three gold medals, two one for the uneven bars, another for the balance beam, and a third for the individual all around. She also won a bronze medal for the floor exercise and a silver as part of the team all around. These wins made her the youngest ever Olympic Gymnastics all around champion, and since the age eligibility requirement has since been raised to at least sixteen, it's a record that will never be broken. Nadia's streak of perfect tens would also be hard to replicate today. That's because gymnastic routines at the Olympics are no longer evaluated with a maximum of ten points. Beginning in two thirds er thousand and five, the mode of scoring changed to a two part system, a D score based on the difficulty and content of the exercise, and an E score grading D execution. These two numbers are then combined to get a final score, which is generally greater than ten. So while it's still theoretically possible to score a perfect ten for execution at the time of recording, that's yet to happen and maybe it never will. As for Nadia herself, she didn't let her perfect performance go to her head. She went right back to training harder than ever, and in nineteen eighty she secured another two gold medals for herself at the Olympics in Moscow, one for the balance beam and another for floor exercise. The following year was a bit of an outlier for Nadia. First, she announced her retirement from competitive gymnastics at the top of her game, and then, while on tour in the United States, her longtime coaches Bella and Marta Caroli defected from communist Romania. Romania's government cracked down hard on the gymnast from then on, severely restricting her travel to Western countries and placing her under almost constant supervision. After eight years of this harsh treatment, Nadia was able to escape her government minders and illegally crossed the border into Hungary. From there, she slowly made her way to the United States, where she was able to build a new life for herself as a gymnastics coach, author, and model. She also met and eventually married fellow gymnast Bart Connor, and together they opened a successful gymnastics studio for teenagers, which they still operate to this day. I'm Gay bluesiay, and hopefully you now know a little more about history today than you did yesterday. If you'd like to keep up with the show, you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at TDI HC Show, and if you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to send them my way by writing to This Day at iHeartMedia dot com. Thanks to Casby Bias for producing the show, and thanks to you for listening. I'll see you back here again tomorrow for another day in History class.