The Perfect Ten of Nadia's Life

What happens to Olympic medallists when they retire from competition? Well some of them get married with other gold medallists and become parents. At least this is the case for Nadia Comaneci and Bart Conner. Comaneci gave birth to their first child, a boy, named Dylan Paul, on June 3, 2006. It sounds as a perfect story of family happiness, but life was not always good for the legendary gymnast Nadia Comaneci.

She was born in the factory town Onesti, Romania in 1961 and was given the non-Romanian name Nadia by her mother after the heroine of a Russian film. Nadia is the shortened version of the Russian name Nadyezhda, which means literally "Hope." At the age of 14, Nadia became the star of the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal winning three gold medals, a silver medal and a bronze. Comaneci became also the first gymnast at the Olympics to receive the perfect score of ten.

After her triumph in Montreal young Nadia became a national hero in Romania. She kept on participating in games having to confront apart from her strong components the highly politicized environment of sports during the Cold War. After her coach's defection to the US her life changed drastically she was under constant surveillance, she was no longer allowed to travel outside Romania. Although she denies the rumors that she had tried to kill herself by drinking bleach and to have been sexually harassed by the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu's son Nicu or to have been her lover she had become a prisoner in her own country. Finally in December 1989, shortly before the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu, she defected to the United States risking her life and walking for six hours at night through half-frozen lakes and impenetrable forests, to cross the Hungarian border.

With her arrival in the States Comaneci was surrounded again by controversy. Some American media suggested that she became the lover of the man who helped her escaping from Romania Constantin Panait, who was married and father of four children. In fact Panait held her captive for free months till she moved to Montreal to live with Alexandru Stefu, a Romanian rugby coach, and his family. In 1991 Nadia was again in the news when Stefu died in a scuba-diving accident.

It was then, when Comaneci was invited to Norman, Oklahoma by another legendary gymnast, Bart Conner to work with him in a gymnastics academy. A new life begun for her and she got back into gymnastics. In 1994 she returned to Romania for the first time since she fled and in 1996 she returned again to get married with Conner in Bucharest. Since then they live together in Oklahoma working with young gymnasts and promoting the sport worldwide.

For all the fans of gymnastics worldwide, Nadia Comaneci will remain the young sweet girl of 1976 Olympics, who changed the history of the sport, but Nadia is not a little girl any more. She is a woman, who opened a new chapter in her adventurous life, called motherhood. As she stated to The Associated Pres, "We've been through a lot of high moments in our life in sports through what we accomplished but this is just something that is totally unique."