Word: comanecis
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...bronze; Boginskaya a gold and silver. Phoebe Mills claimed the only gymnastics medal for the U.S., sharing the bronze for the balance beam with Rumania's Gabriela Potorac. In a final count of coveted 10s, both Silivas and Shushunova tied the record seven scored by Rumania's Nadia Comaneci...
...Korbut was the scrawny, pig-tailed brunet at the 1972 Munich Games who, with her double-jointed contortions and infectious grin, convinced us that human hearts beat within the bodies of robotic Soviet athletes. Four years later at the Montreal Games, it was a long-limbed brooding Rumanian, Nadia Comaneci, who stole hearts by posting the first perfect 10s ever in Olympic gymnastics competition. Then in Los Angeles in 1984, American Mary Lou Retton bounced + into our living rooms with her big vault and still bigger smile, assuring her place in the pantheon of gymnastics greats and on boxes...
...audacity that would have been unthinkable four years earlier. And four years from now, even those moves may seem out of the dark ages. So too will the sweethearts of Seoul. When Olga Korbut tried to repeat her Munich triumphs in 1976, she was upstaged by Newcomer Nadia Comaneci. When Nadia tried to re-create her glory in 1980, audiences hardly recognized the once sylphlike pixie. Mary Lou Retton perhaps proved the wisest; she fired her single shot at glory, then retired her grips and took up the commentator's mike...
...audience happy. Part of her secret may be that glorious smile. She has superb technique based on first-rate ballet training, but she makes even a triple throw look spontaneous. She has the innocence and sheer energy that enable her, like earlier East bloc sweethearts Olga Korbut and Nadia Comaneci, to slay hearts on both sides of the Great Power divide...
Next, Disney World was a happy and uneventful stop. Then the Dallas barbecue was a hazard only to gymnasts: for them, just to whiff Texas barbecue is to risk going to bed as Nadia Comaneci and waking up as Shelley Winters. Finally, a little regretfully, the team disbanded. "Celebrity's been a big change for me," Retton said. "In a way it's really neat. But it won't change me. I'm still just plain Mary Lou. Meeting the President was neat. I'm a little sad it's over after nine years...