Episode Details

Nadia Comaneci was fourteen years old when she scored the first perfect 10.0 in Olympic gymnastics history — a score so unprecedented that the scoreboard could not display it and showed 1.00 instead. She won five Olympic gold medals for Romania, was exploited as propaganda by the Ceausescu regime, and escaped across the Romanian border on foot in the middle of the night in 1989, just weeks before the revolution that toppled the dictatorship.

This episode traces Comaneci from her Romanian childhood through the Montreal Olympics miracle, the years as a state-controlled athlete, and the dramatic midnight border crossing that brought her to the West.

• The discovery by coach Bela Karolyi and the training regimen that produced Olympic perfection
• The 1976 Montreal Olympics — seven perfect 10s and the scoreboard that could not keep up
• Life under Ceausescu — state surveillance, restricted travel, and exploitation as national propaganda
• The midnight escape across the border and the new life in America