Going Gold

Dear Nadia,
    Tell me everything...

Dear Friend,
    I don’t know everything. You have asked me to begin a correspondence in the hope of learning about my life. I am reticent. I’ve never written about myself before because there is not enough time in the world to spend it looking back.

“Letters to a Young Gymnast” by Nadia Comaneci, Olympic-gold champion, 1976.

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Dear Alex,

Gold stinks, though odorless. It gets into your head and triggers panic, the kind of purity and perfection unreal yet alluring.

At the 1976 Montreal Olympics, perfection mocked doubts when 14-year-old Nadia Comaneci, a Romanian gymnast, scored a perfect score of 10 on the uneven bars.  No camera had zoomed in on her until then. No judge had expected the flawless airborne magic until the magic was no more. She was the first and youngest to have grasped the intangible in Olympic history.

Riding on Comaneci’s perfected moment were the twin waves of imperfection and unbelief. At the time, Omega, the keeper of time and scores for the Olympics since 1932, could only display results on the scoreboards up to a max of 3 digits rounded to the nearest hundredth. For Comaneci, her actual score of 10.00 was consequently limited to 1.00 on display. The clarity of clerical error underscored our refusal in expecting the impossible.

Long before the 1976 Games, Omega had cast a question of greater absurdity to the International Olympic Committee: should a four-digit score be considered against convention for the Olympic scoreboards? The decision was set before the proposal: a 10.00 is not possible. There would be no reason for change.

So why would anyone, in mind and limb, choose to change? What’s in it for me before you? Or could it be that I must see you before I see me?

A shift in one decimal of space, straining to budge the ears to look, sweating for gold in perfecting change to care of self and another - we are poised now for world stage in this pandemic vow to re-open for the good and ruined, the old and the tender towards the perfect pitch for gold in change.

Yours, Kate