30 greatest female athletes of all time

17. Nadia Comăneci
Gymnastics

There have been so many amazing gymnasts in history, this entire list could be full of them. It’s been one of the premier women’s sports, and it is one of the reasons people are so excited about the Summer Olympics every four years. That popularity really started in the 1970s when viewers were enthralled by a 14-year-old girl who could hit a routine perfectly. And she was the first person to do that. 

That’s right, a Perfect 10. That is the score Nadia Comăneci received for her uneven bars routine at the 1976 Games in Montreal. It was so unexpected, as the scoreboard accidentally showed 1.00 instead of 10.0, which caused confusion for everyone there. She would go on to hit seven Perfect 10s at that Olympic Games. The Romanian finished that year with three gold medals, including in the All Around. 

Her dominance came in literally her first professional tournament, where at 13 years old, she swept pretty much every award at the 1975 European Women's Artistic Gymnastics Championships. Fast forward to 1980, the most controversial Olympic Games yet, which were held in the then-Soviet Union. Comăneci was up against Soviet gymnast Nellie Kim. Despite facing a Soviet gymnast in the Soviet Union in a set of Games that the United States boycotted, Comăneci still came out with two gold medals.

She had become so popular that a tour of the U.S. started in 1981 where she was the star. Unfortunately, many of her coaches and crew chose to defect from communist Romania during the trip, leading to intense supervision on Comăneci once she returned. Because of her restricted travel, she didn’t compete much after 1981. She finished her career with five gold medals, but we never got the one-on-one competition with Mary Lou Retton in 1984.