Competition already began yesterday with Men’s and Women’s Football (soccer to us Yanks), Rugby, Handball, and other preliminary contests and continues today with Shooting, Fencing, Rowing, Volleyball, Hockey, and Equestrian Events. That schedule is a testament to the eclectic nature of the Games—big time team competitions with national honor and passion on the line to the niche events not closely followed outside their own bailiwicks and seldom, if ever, seen by casual sports fans.
All of that before the extravagant and highly anticipated official Opening Ceremonies and ignition of the Cauldron of the XXXIII Olympiad Paris 2024. The French, hosting the Summer games for the first time in a century, promise a spectacle on a never before seen epic scale unfolding across the City of Lights and amid its architectural, artistic, cultural, and historic monuments. Athletes will not parade behind their flags into a main Olympic stadium but floating in 27 barges about four miles down the Seine to a temporary setting under the Eifel Tower. The international media are in a carefully managed frenzy of speculation on what superstars might perform—odds are currently on French-Canadian pop diva Celine Dionne who has recently been medically treated for a condition that made it almost impossible to sing and American Lady Gaga who warbled a powerful version of La Vie en Rose in her version of A Star is Born—as well as what athletes and celebrities with be in the final Olympic Torch Relay. The ceremonies will be live streamed on Peacock starting at 1:30 CDT and airing tonight in Prime Time on NBC at 6:30.
These are the first post Coronavirus games after the severe restrictions of Tokyo’s pandemic delayed Olympiad in 2021. Both athletes and Fans are eager for the full-throttle experience.
Of course, given the inevitable international tensions that have surrounded all recent Games, there have already been incidents and demonstrations and terrorism is possible. Flash points this year include the ongoing Israeli pulverizing attacks on Gaza, Russia’s War on Ukraine, Yemini Rebels and attacks on shipping and allied naval in the Red Sea, regional rivalries, and domestic French political instability. Earlier today France’s high-speed train lines were targeted by multiple “malicious” acts including arson in what has been described as “coordinated sabotage” to disrupt travel ahead of the opening ceremony.
Despite those real concerns, excitement for the games themselves and the thousands of international athletes remains high.
American fans are among the most fervently nationalist to the point of near jingoism only in the States but at the competitions. Paris has been lucratively flooded by American tourists with event tickets and those out to soak up the very expensive excitement of the city, its food, and culture. Groomed by NBC’s heartwarming and emotionally manipulative athlete back stories Americans closely follow their biggest heroes including swimmer Katie Ledecky, and a host of dominant Track and Field contestants. But the super star of super stars four-time Olympic medalist Simone Biles continues to dominate her sport and introduce ever more difficult routines all while becoming a symbol for female empowerment, and mental health.
Biles brings to mind another Olympic gymnast. Here is a look back…
I admit I am hooked on the Olympics, even obscure sports I don’t understand—maybe especially those sports where stadiums are empty and Americans perplexed. The athletes in those events can never hope to really profit, even if they take home the Gold.
A lot of that passion started 48 years ago.
Like most Americans I had a passing interest in the 1976 Montreal Olympics as a kind of quadrennial spectacle but knew next to nothing about the fine points of most of the events. Women’s gymnastics was as foreign to me as water polo. But I followed the Games on television anyhow.
On July 18 I saw something that got my attention. A diminutive dark haired 14 year old from Romania with big brown eyes and a shy smile mounted the uneven parallel bars and performed a routine so extraordinary even I knew that something special had occurred. Nadia Comaneci had earned the first perfect score of 10 from notoriously picky and sometimes suspiciously political Olympic judges. The automatic scoreboard was not even programmed to show such a score. It flashed 1.0.
Comaneci would go on to be awarded six more perfect scores during the competition and win Gold for All-around performance and for the parallel bars and balance beam; a Bronze Medal in floor exercises; and single handedly propelled the Romanian team to a Silver behind the mighty and traditionally dominant USSR team. It was one of the most commanding athletic performances in any sport in history.
She was an instant worldwide celebrity and inspired countless young girls from Portland to Prague to take up the sport. Gymnastics, which had received a boost four years earlier with the performance of another teenage phenom—Olga Korbut, was elevated to a place as the central glamour event of subsequent Olympiads.
Comaneci was born November 12, 1961 in Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej (now Oneşti), Romania. The country was one of the grimmest of the Eastern European states where dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu attempted a North Korean style overhaul of the culture. The result was an impoverished nation, the abandonment of huge number of children to state orphanages, and the dislocation of the traditional Romanian rural culture with demolition of villages and forced relocation to numbingly identical urban apartment complexes.
Comaneci’s natural ability and agility were spotted early and she was enrolled in gymnastics by the time she was six when she was chosen to attend Béla Károlyi's experimental gymnastics school. Her early success as a gymnast shielded her and her family from the worst of the Ceauşescu regime. Because her parents lived in the same town as Károlyi's school she was even allowed to live at home with her parents most of the time instead of being confined to barracks-like dormitories.
In 1970 she won the Romanian Nationals and was successfully competing internationally by 1972 at the age of 11. She nearly swept the 1975 European Championships in Skien, Norway, winning the all-around and gold medals on every event but the floor exercise, in which she placed second. By the run-up to the ’76 Olympics it was clear that she would be a major challenge to the USSR team that included Korbut and a rising young star, Nellie Kim.
In March she earned her first perfect 10 at the American Cup at Madison Square Garden in New York, games that were televised in the U.S. and Europe. She followed with perfect scores in meets in Japan and elsewhere. So her Olympic triumph was not unexpected among followers of the sport.
She returned from Montreal to Romania as a national heroine. She was personally greeted by President Ceauşescu and became the youngest person every named Hero of Socialist Labor.
But the government began to interfere in her career. As she was successfully defending her European Championship Ceauşescu abruptly ordered the Romanian team to leave the competition over a scoring controversy. Back home she was ordered to leave her long-time coach Béla Karolyi and his wife Marta and placed with a politically reliable coach in Bucharest. Miserable and lonely, Comaneci began gaining weight and slacking at practice causing her to place 4th in the 1978 World Championships. After that she was allowed to return to the Károlyis.
In 1979, slimmed down and disciplined, she won an unprecedented third consecutive European championship despite competing with an infected hand. At the 1980 Moscow Games, unseen by most Americans because of the President Jimmy Carter’s boycott, she placed second, by a small margin, to Soviet Yelena Davydova in the all around, defended her Olympic title in the balance beam, and tied with Nellie Kim for the gold medal in the floor exercise.
After a 1981 exhibition tour of the United States during which the Károlyis defected, Comaneci officially retired from competition. Although allowed to accompany the Romanian team to the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles under heavy surveillance, she was banned from most international travel except to Moscow and Cuba.
She was given prestigious positions with the Romanian Gymnastics Federation and took up coaching, but later said her life in the ‘80s “took on a new bleakness.” In 1989, shortly before the revolution that deposed and executed Ceauşescu, she made a daring escape with a group of other young Romanians and eventually came to the United States in the company of Constantin Panait, a shady character and married father of four. She shocked Americans who remembered her as a young girl by wearing highly revealing clothing over a curvaceous figure and slathered in thick, gaudy make-up. She was trashed in the press for “looking like a whore.”
She fled to Montreal, the city of her greatest triumph, where she took up coaching gymnastics and doing occasional modeling.
Former American Olympian Bart Conner invited her to join the staff of his gym in Oklahoma City and the two became engaged in 1994. The couple wed in Bucharest in 1996 on Comaneci’s first visit to her homeland since fleeing. In 2010 she became a naturalized American Citizen, while retaining dual Romanian citizenship.
Comaneci now acts as her homeland’s Honorary Consul General to the United States. She and Connor continue to operate their gym as well as a string of athletic stores. She has active in numerous charitable causes including Vice-Chair of the Board of Directors of the International Special Olympics and Vice President of the Board of Directors of the Muscular Dystrophy Association. She has also personally funded the construction and operation of the Children’s Clinic in Bucharest to provide medical care and social services to Romanian children.
In 2006 at the age of 45 she gave birth to a son.
The little Romanian waif is all grown up now and doing very well, thank you.
