At the 1976 Montreal Olympics a 14-year-old stuck a flawless dismount and the scoreboard flashed 1.00. The machines had only three digits because the gymnastics federation insisted a perfect 10 was biomechanically impossible. Nadia Comaneci’s mechanics were simply too perfect for the engineering.

This deep dive strips away the highlight reels to examine how a restless kid in a small Romanian town was forged into a global icon, and how her perfection was claimed as property of a restrictive state.

• The schoolyard cartwheels that revealed her power-to-weight ratio to coach Bela Karolyi
• How the media crowned her with a soap-opera theme she never actually skated to
• State interference, isolation from her coach, and puberty that thew off her rotations
• Competing at the 1979 World Championships through blood poisoning to win team gold
• Her six-hour midnight escape across the Hungarian border weeks before the 1989 revolution