When a 14-year-old Romanian gymnast named Nadia Comaneci scored a perfect 10 on the uneven bars at the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympics — a score so unprecedented that it was initially displayed as a 1.00 due to a lack of space on the scoreboard — a new age for female gymnastics had officially begun, with younger participants executing new, more challenging moves. It was “the attack of the mini-monsters,” as Sports Illustrated’s Bob Ottum referred to them in a 1979 article.
“After Nadia, everyone starts to look more like Nadia,” Dvora Meyers, author of the new book, “The End of the Perfect 10: The Making and Breaking of Gymnastics’ Top Score — From Nadia to Now” tells The Post. “She greatly upped the acrobatic ante.”
But small, young and strong wasn’t always the look for female gymnasts.
From the 1920s, when women first started competing in gymnastics, there was a much different aesthetic at work.
“The gymnasts,” writes Meyers, “were grown women in their 20s and even 30s possessed of fit yet thoroughly feminine physiques, evident breasts and wide hips.”
“Back in 1948, women’s gymnastics wasn’t daring,” writes Meyers, also noting that in that same year there were no individual medals for female gymnasts — just group medals based on the tallied scores of the teammates. “It didn’t demand extreme strength, or above-average coordination, or even a full-time commitment to practice.”
Sometimes, they were even pregnant, such as Larisa Latynina, who competed in the 1958 world championships four months with child, telling only her doctor but not her coach. The 24-year-old won five gold medals at that event. (“I consider them mine,” Larisa’s daughter Tatyana joked to The New York Times in 2012. “We won them together.”)
“[Gymnastics] was a sport of grace for women, never little girls.”
- Vera Caslavska
Between 1956 and 1964, the year she turned 30, Latynina won 18 Olympic medals, a record surpassed by Michael Phelps in 2012.
In the 1960s, they often sported beehives — the popular hairstyle of the time — looks that would not have been out of place on “Mad Men.” “You would see women who were obviously fit — not fat — but they looked like women who had hips, breasts,” says Meyers.
“It was a different look, based on dance. Taller, more womanly, a little less masculine.”
There were superstars like Czech gymnast Vera Caslavska, who was 26 years old, 5-foot-3 and weighed 121 pounds when she won four gold medals at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City (compare that with Shannon Miller, who won five gold medals in 1992 at age 15, 4-foot-10 and only 79 pounds).
The transformation from adult woman to teen powerhouse was a process that had been in the making for a few years with the 1972 Olympic performance of Olga “Sparrow from Minsk” Korbut, who stood 4-foot-11 and wowed the world while performing a never-before-seen backward aerial somersault on the balance beam — but which really solidified with Comaneci.
Today gymnasts are young, strong and super-fast, like Gabby Douglas, the two-time Olympic gold medalist who’s competing in Rio this year at age 20 (making her practically an old-timer).
“We’re living in the era of the power gymnasts. Women like 4-foot-9 Simone Biles, who perform extremely difficult and powerful skills. Simone is very short, uniquely short even among gymnasts,” says Meyers of 19-year-old Biles, who recently became the first woman in 40 years to win four consecutive US women’s gymnastics championships.
“Mary Lou Retton was another one of the first of those gymnasts,” says Meyers. “The defining characteristic is how strong they look.”
And they are mostly teenagers — the minimum age has changed over the years from 14 (established in 1970) to 15 in 1981 and 16 in 1997, in the interest of reducing demands on young teens.
Meanwhile, the “little girls” have upped the ante — and the sport itself has changed dramatically.
“[Before], the routines had very few requirements and there was more room for creativity and subjectivity of the judges,” says Meyers.
“They would be looking for gracefulness. A straight-up trickster without a dance background or refinement would really struggle to succeed.”
Today the pixie powerhouses are undoubtedly here to stay, but that doesn’t mean everyone’s happy about it.
“Gymnastics has become degraded,” sniped Caslavska, the 1968 champion, in an oft-quoted interview. “Once it was a sport of grace for women, never little girls.”