30 Olympic athletes who dominated their events

26. Nadia Comăneci

The 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal are known for many things – Canada hosting their first Olympic Games as a nation, Sugar Ray Leonard winning gold for America as a light welterweight in boxing, and Bruce Jenner (you now know him as Caitlyn) triumphantly capturing gold in the decathlon and then famously taking a victory lap around the track with a U.S. flag pinned to his shoulders like a cape.

But arguably the greatest and most memorable moment of that year’s competition came when 14-year-old Nadia Comăneci earned her native Romania three gold medals in gymnastics – and along the way became the first gymnast in Olympic history to earn a score of a perfect 10. One 10 wasn’t enough for Comăneci, though, so she went ahead and nailed six more perfect scores on her way to first-place finishes in the balance beam, uneven bars, and all-around categories. She also nabbed both a silver team competition medal and a bronze floor exercise medal, just for good measure.

Besides becoming a household name and helping to popularize the sport around the globe, Comăneci also invented two unique moves on the asymmetric bars that have since been named after her and added to the official Code of Points (gymnastics’ rulebook and scoring system).

As legend has it, before the Montreal Games began, a scoreboard operator asked whether it would be necessary to find equipment that featured a fourth digit capability. The operator was told not to worry, as a perfect score of 10.00 was ‘impossible.’ When Comăneci finished her routine on the uneven bars, the scoreboard lit up ‘1.00,’ and it took the crowd a moment to realize what had just occurred.

Clearly, impossible means nothing for Comăneci.

Next: 25. Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh Jennings