The scoreboard couldn't show Nadia Comaneci's perfect 10

On July 18, 1976, at the Montreal Olympics, Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci, aged just 14, swung through a flawless routine on the uneven bars — a high-flying release and recatch among its hardest elements — and stuck the dismount cold. The judges awarded her a perfect 10.00, the first ever given in Olympic gymnastics.

Then the equipment failed her. The Omega scoreboards had been built to display only three digits, on the shared assumption that perfection was unreachable, so they physically could not render “10.00”. Comaneci’s score flashed up as 1.00 instead — the closest the hardware could come. The mistake forced a redesign; scoreboards and scoring systems afterward were rebuilt to accommodate a four-digit perfect mark.

No one had imagined they would ever need the extra digit.

She was only getting started. Over the rest of the Games she earned six more perfect 10s and took three gold medals — the all-around, the balance beam, and the uneven bars. Much of the polish traced back to her coach Bela Karolyi, whose relentless, exacting program had shaped her since childhood.

The image of the slight teenager beside a board reading 1.00 became one of the most recognizable in sport. Her story took another turn in 1989, when she defected to the United States just before the fall of Romania’s communist regime — completing her passage from state-trained prodigy to a lasting global symbol of gymnastics.