Even before Nadia Comăneci’s legendary performances at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, East German gymnastics officials had taken careful note of the Romanian teenager. Ellen Berger, the East German national team coach and a member of the FIG’s Women’s Technical Committee, was characteristically measured when asked whether Comăneci’s near sweep of the 1975 European Championships had surprised her. “No,” she said flatly. “We knew Nadia and were aware of her capabilities.” The sensation, Berger explained, was partly an artifact of the FIG’s age regulations, which had kept Comăneci off the international stage until the year she turned 14 — meaning the wider gymnastics world had simply not yet had the chance to see her.
What Berger did not withhold was her admiration for the quality of the performance itself. Comăneci ‘s routines, she observed, were extraordinarily difficult and executed with total confidence. More striking still was her psychological makeup: “She knows she is good, and nothing bothers her — not the audience, not her competitors, nothing at all.” Her one caveat was equally revealing: a single competition, she insisted, could not support sweeping conclusions. Ludmilla Tourischeva, she noted pointedly, remained one of the best gymnasts in the world. The subtext was clear — East Germany was not yet ready to concede the future to Romania.
