The First Perfect Ten
At the age of 14, Nadia Comaneci turned the gymnastics world upside down when she scored the first perfect ten in the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal. The gymnastics world was so unprepared for this that her score was actually flashed as a 1.00 because the score board had not been made to handle the 10.00 score.
10.00 has always been the ultimate in the sport of gymnastics until recently when the sport’s governing body changed the scoring system to one that is more open ended – consisting of a form score and a difficulty score. There has been much debate over the system and whether it is good or bad. From the general public’s viewpoint it is just confusing – everyone associated the perfect 10 with gymnastics and it was much easier to understand.
While the perfect 10 will no longer be achieved on the international stage, it is still alive and well at least here in the US where gymnasts in USA Gymnastics’ Junior Olympic program are still judged using the system based on the perfect 10. Additionally, the NCAA still uses the old scoring system and if you go to one of the bigger teams competitions, you may just be lucky enough to witness the perfect 10 in action again.
What do you think – will we ever see the perfect 10 on an Olympic stage again? Did the sport lose some of its identity when the 10.0 scoring system was thrown out?
