In 1973, at the Friendship Cup, Europe started to acknowledge Comăneci’s greatness. Larisa Latynina, the head coach of the Soviet team, called her the “Romanian Korbut,” and the East German newspaper asked, “Did Gera see the Olympic gymnastics champion of Montreal?”
At this competition, Comăneci competed a Tsukahara on vault, resulting in cheers from the crowd and a gold medal on the apparatus. It was not the first Tsukahara done by a woman on vault. (Beate Gehrke had competed one at the Riga International in 1972.) But it was still extremely rare. (Both Tourischeva and Grigoraş would perform a Tsukahara a few months later at the 1973 European Championships.)
What follows are East German and Romanian accounts of the competition.
Typically, when Americans tell the story of Nadia Comăneci, they start with the 1975 European Championships or the 1976 American Cup. But the truth is that Comăneci made a name for herself in Europe much earlier. One of her first triumphs was at the 1972 Olympic Hopes/Druzhba (Friendship) competition.
If you’ve read Comăneci’s book, Letters to a Young Gymnast, you might recall a brief mention of the competition:
On the heels of failure came my first success, at the 1972 Friendship Cup. Our team’s gymnasts were only ten years old. All gymnasts from the other countries were in their late teens and early twenties. Bela and Marta hadn’t even known how much younger we were before we arrived at the competition because they’d never seen the Soviet gymnasts, let alone the Czechs or Germans, compete. We walked into the arena, tiny little girls with pigtails, facing the likes of Lyudmila Turischeva, a long-legged and unbelievably graceful gymnast from Russia.
[…]
I won the all-around gold at the Friendship Cup. The team won the silver. We had done the unthinkable, beating the best international gymnasts in the world.
Letters to a Young Gymnast
To be sure, Tourischeva did not compete at this meet, female competitors had to be 16 or younger (not in their early 20s), and Comăneci did not win the all-around at the 1972 competition (she did in 1973). That said, her first major success indeed came at the age of 10 in Sofia in 1972, and it paved the way for future international successes — long before the Montreal Olympics.
So, let’s take a look at what was written about the competition in 1972. It was a different time — a time when the Romanian newspapers didn’t know how to properly spell Comăneci’s surname. Nevertheless, the Hungarians could see that Romania was a rising power in gymnastics:
[W]e must keep an eye on the sporting careers of Romanian gymnasts over the age of 10 in the coming years if we want to keep pace with the development of women’s gymnastics.
Sportélet, Sept. 1, 1972
The beam podium at the 1972 Friendship Cup. On the top step are Nadia Comăneci and Krisztina Medveczky. The Hungarian article below mentions the big bows in the Romanian gymnasts’ hair. Image source: Sportélet, Sept. 1, 1972
Note: Noting the factual errors in Comăneci’s book is not a dig at her. If you asked me about details from when I was 10, I would probably get some of the facts wrong, as well.
Note #2: The title of this post spotlights Comăneci because it’s part of a series of posts on her early career.
