The scoreboard that couldn't count to 10

On July 18, 1976, 14-year-old Nadia Comaneci became the first gymnast to receive a perfect 10.0 in Olympic competition. The Montreal arena's scoreboard answered with a number that looked like a malfunction: 1.00. 1

The Romanian gymnast had just finished her uneven-bars routine in the team competition. She had performed cleanly enough to expect a 9.9, which would have been an excellent start. Instead, the judges gave her the highest possible mark, and the electronic board was not prepared to show it.

The scoreboard could display only three digits. A perfect 10.0 needed four, so the system dropped the leading zero and showed 1.00. Spectators and even Comaneci's teammates had to work out whether the display meant a terrible score or an extraordinary one. 2 3

Olympics.com reports that OMEGA, the Games' official timekeeper and scorer, had asked before Montreal whether the scoreboards needed to accommodate four digits. Organizers decided they did not. That decision made sense until a teenager from Romania produced a score nobody had needed to display at an Olympics before. 2

Comaneci later recalled that she was already thinking about her next apparatus when the arena erupted. She said she assumed the 1.00 was "way too low" and only began to understand after a teammate suggested it might actually be a 10. 2

The perfect score came during the team event, but it quickly became the defining image of the Montreal Games. Comaneci earned six more perfect 10s over the rest of the competition, won three gold medals, and took home five medals overall. 1

The oddity is easy to miss when the moment is reduced to "Nadia scored a 10." She did something unprecedented on the apparatus, then stood beside a machine that could not express what had happened. The most famous image from the routine captures both facts at once: a 14-year-old gymnast looking slightly puzzled, and a giant board insisting on 1.00.

Comaneci later put the missing digit in perspective: