Word: comaneci
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...swimmers who provided the opening week of the Montreal Olympics with their reigning deity. That huge mantle fell upon the tiny shoulders of Nadia Comaneci, who electrified the crowds and bollixed the computers by compiling the first perfect gymnastic scores. Performing her bold and difficult routines with consummate control, Comaneci (pronounced Com-a-netch) tallied three 10s in the team competition, two in the individual all-around contest, and two in the individual-apparatus competition-showings good enough to win her three gold medals, one silver and one bronze. Whether doing backflips on the beam or rocketing herself around...
...Comaneci's achievements seemed so effortless that it was easy to forget she was not merely doing what comes naturally. Although her debut in senior international competition came only last year, when she leaped out of Rumanian obscurity to take the European Championship away from the Soviet Union's five-time winner, Ludmilla Turishcheva, 23, Nadia had been preparing for last week's moment of golden triumph for more than half her life...
Born in Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, a city of 60,000 in the Carpathian Mountains, Comaneci began her training with Béla Károlyi and his wife Marta, the gymnastic coaches at a special sports lycée in her home town. They had spotted her frolicking in a kindergarten playground and been impressed by her lack of fear. She was six years old. "At first it was like a game," said Nadia last week, showing no trace of nostalgia for those presumably more carefree days. "But by the age of eight," Coach Károlyi noted, "the students...
Whether or not it is the daily regimen of five hours' classroom study and three to four hours' gymnastics training that has made her so, Comaneci is an extraordinarily somber child. Although she struts about and fidgets on the sidelines during competitions as if she were trying to release an inexhaustible flow of energy, she is almost eerily still outside the arena. While waiting to take her daily medical checkup one morning, she watched Olympic swimming heats on TV, her dark, unblinking eyes fixed on the action, her pale face expressionless, her hands folded decorously...
...each flawless performance, Comaneci would flash an automatic smile across her face as if it were an electronic scoreboard and prance briefly around the platform. But the show of enthusiasm almost seemed rehearsed, and she would subside immediately into the deep reaches of her concentration and composure. The smile and quick little dance steps about the floor were the only concession she made to the audience's clear desire that she refashion herself in the image of that ponytailed starlet of the 1972 Olympics, Russia's Olga Korbut. She is not an Olga...