Now, Life Is a 10 : Comaneci Won Nine Olympic Gymnastics Medals as a Teen-Ager, but She Smiles Easier These Days

Like a woman proudly showing off her jewelry, Nadia Comaneci opens a scarlet box and pulls out her treasures:

Nine Olympic medals. Five gold. Three silver. One bronze.

These represent the best of Nadia.

She has also saved the number she wore in 1976 at Montreal, when she scored the first perfect score of 10 in gymnastics history, then went on to record six more of them and win three gold medals.

Every medal stirs a memory, one of recent vintage on how these treasures came to be resting safely on a table in the back room of a Baltimore restaurant on a recent summer day.

She almost lost them all.

In 1989, Comaneci defected from Romania, taking only the clothes she was wearing. When Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu learned that she had fled, he immediately sent soldiers to her family’s home in Bucharest to seize her medals.

Little did they know they would need a moving van.

“Ceausescu thought I had only a few medals, but I have a room full of them in Bucharest, between 150-200 in all,” Comaneci said. “They needed suitcases to haul them out.”

Befuddled about which medals to take, the soldiers sealed the room with wax and rope so no one could enter and told Comaneci’s brother they would be back the next day with boxes to take the medals away.

“But the next day the revolution broke out, so they never showed up,” Comaneci smirked. “When my brother came to see me in America, he carried these medals to me.”

Nine ribbonless Olympic medals, looking like coins in a box. Plus medals from the World and European championships.

“She even has two 1980 Olympic gold medals,” said Bart Conner, former Olympian and constant companion of Comaneci. “Nobody has seen those in this country, because we weren’t there (in Moscow, because of the U.S. boycott).”

Conner and Comaneci attended the U.S. Olympic gymnastics trials together in Baltimore last month.

“You know what the International Olympic Committee’s Olympic Order is?” Conner said. “It looks like a laurel wreath with an Olympic ring? She’s got one of those too. It’s broken and sitting in the box. Only about nine people in the world have one.”

Three years in the United States have changed Comaneci. At 30, she smiles easier now, and laughs often. It’s quite a difference from the stoic 14-year old the world longed to see smile at Montreal. Or the overgrown 18-year-old only people in some other parts of the world got to see at Moscow.

But the mystery that seemed to shroud Nadia is no longer. For one thing, she understands and speaks English well. In Montreal, she had to speak through Romanian interpreters who didn’t necessarily say what Comaneci might have answered had she understood the question.

“(Romanian officials) told us all the time what we could and could not say in Montreal,” she said. “For example, they told us not to talk about the country and what was going on. They told us before the Olympics that we wouldn’t have a chance to talk directly with the journalists, so we didn’t have to worry about it.

“But they also told us, ‘Just try to make it so the people will see you talking. We really don’t care what you say because we will translate what we want to say.’ ”

In later years, when Comaneci did understand English and could speak it a little, the government still refused to let her talk, she said. Her silence abetted a rumor that she was so unhappy in 1978 when Ceausescu wanted to replace her coach, Bela Karolyi, that she tried to commit suicide by drinking bleach.

“I knew I wouldn’t be able to win without Bela, so I faked drinking bleach hoping he could stay,” Comaneci said. “They took Bela out of the job anyway, but in six months they brought him back.”

Three years later, Comaneci returned to Romania without Karolyi, who defected in 1981 after an exhibition in the United States.

“I cried on the plane,” Comaneci said. “I knew my career was over, but I was sad for gymnastics in the country, I didn’t see anybody else in my country that was as good as Bela.

“He tried to tell me he was going to defect, but I don’t think I understood it too well at the time and I was not prepared.”

Comaneci informally retired that same year.

Then, in 1984, Juan Antonio Samaranch, president of the IOC, placed the Olympic Order around her neck.

She cried again.

Karolyi found Comaneci on a playground in Onesti, Moldava. She was 6. Eight years later, he had his first star when she dethroned the five-time European champion, Soviet Lyudmila Tourischeva, Comaneci’s idol.

In 1976 at Montreal, neither Olga Korbut or Tourischeva could beat Comaneci, whose daring moves and technical precision on the uneven bars earned a 10, the first ever. She followed with a 10 on the balance beam and went on to finish the Games with seven of them.

Comaneci, a slender 4 feet 11, said before the Games that she hoped to win a medal for her country. She returned with five--golds for the all-around, uneven bars and beam, a silver for the Romanian team’s second place and a bronze for the floor exercise.

“I showed the medals to Bela last night,” Comaneci said. “And I was reminiscing with him about all the times we had together, the scoring scandals, and we were laughing so hard.

“Like here is the number that I wore on my back at Montreal, No. 73. After the Olympics were over, Bela and I were looking at the number and said, ‘There is a meaning here.’ ”

“I scored seven perfect 10s and won three gold medals. If you multiply 7 by 3 you get 21, the number of that Olympic year. and if you add 7 plus 3 you get 10, the perfect score.”

In the next Olympics, at Moscow, Comaneci won four medals, gold for the floor exercise and beam, and silver for the all-around and team. But the United States boycotted Moscow, and Americans did not get to see how Comaneci lost the all-around title.

Her final event was the balance beam, and she needed a 9.9 to defeat Soviet Yelena Davydova. And these were the Moscow Games . After Comaneci’s routine, the judges’ scores exceeded the range of acceptability so they were required to confer.

“They fought for 28 minutes,” Comaneci said. “Bela was pacing and going crazy. The meet director was a little teeny guy, and he was pacing and going in and out and between the judges, saying they were losing time, and he kept looking at his watch.

“Then in the middle of this conference, this little guy hits a button and up pops a 9.85. The Russian crowd went crazy and Davydova won the gold. And later we found out that my score average was 9.912 and I would have won the Olympics.

“I got several letters afterward from people in Romania that said I owed them money because they threw their televisions out of the window waiting for the score.”

But no story of Comaneci’s beats the one about the 1977 European Championships in Prague, when Ceausescu was in Romania, watching his team on television, and got so mad at the scoring that he sent his private plane and literally pulled the team off the floor during competition.

“We were in the individual event finals and the first event was vault,” Comaneci said. “I scored higher so I was in first place and Nelli Kim (of the Soviet Union) in second. Then a few minutes later they changed Nelli Kim’s score and she tied me. I thought, ‘Oh, this is something.’

“Then, when we went to march to get the medal, they changed Nelli’s score again, putting her first and me second. Just like that.

“Well, everybody in Romania was seeing it on live television, and Ceausescu was watching and he said, ‘Send the airplane and take them out of the competition.’ But we didn’t know that. So I prepared for the next event, which was bars.”

The Romanian ambassador based in Prague went down on the floor and told Karolyi to stop competing, but Karolyi told the ambassador to go sit down. Comaneci scored a 10 on the bars and got another medal. Then moved on to the beam. Again the ambassador told them to stop, and Karolyi waved him off.

“I did the beam, I land, I got a 10, I waved to the public and I was immediately grabbed like luggage off the mat by the ambassador and embassy people, and they put us all on a bus to the airport,” Comaneci said.

“So here’s the Romanian team on Ceausescu’s private plane going home and nobody tells us what is going on. The pilot kept talking to the Romanian airport. He tells us there are 5,000 people at the airport, now there are 10,000 people at the airport. . . . People who were watching television were waiting for us when we arrived.”

When the Romanians didn’t show up for the medal ceremony, they gave Comaneci’s gold medal to Nelli Kim.

That’s the only one she is missing.

Conner got in touch with Comaneci well after she arrived in the United States in a scandalous fury. Comaneci had fled Romania with the help of Constantin Panait, a Romanian national who was married and living in Florida.

She says her plan was to live with him and his wife until she could make a life for herself. Instead, she says, Panait held her hostage, concocting a romance that cast her as a home wrecker in the press.

Conner, who knew Comaneci through gymnastics, was confused when he read of her situation. Finally, in February of 1990, Comaneci was able to escape from Panait with the help of a former Romanian coach, who lured Panait to Canada, then helped Comaneci get away.

The fiasco caused the quiet, withdrawn Comaneci to retreat even further.

“Mine was not a short story,” she says. “It was a long one. And people here wanted it to be fast. It has taken some time to tell my story.”

Since joining Conner--they split time among Venice Beach, Norman, Okla., and her home in Montreal--Comaneci says she has become a more open, trusting person.

“In a Communist country, people are more inside themselves,” Comaneci said. “You are afraid to trust the people. That was why I was afraid to talk. I would think, ‘Why are they asking me that? What do they want from me?’

“Perhaps when I was born, I was born to be this kind of person, but because of my country, they made me be different. I’m finding out I’m not that person that lived in Romania. I wanted to live this life.”