Nadia Comaneci Quotes
In Montreal, I kept thinking, 'Pay attention: this is the Olympics! It only happens once every four years!'
Comaneci, Nadia. Letters to a Young Gymnast. Basic Books, 2004, p. 57.
The year before {625800} he had castigated the Germans for discriminating against Jewish and other athletes because of their warped political/ideological views. However, there were so many people in the Olympic movement, that by 1934 there was much advocacy of the boycott of the coming 1936 Berlin Olympics. Brundage who himself was somewhat anti-Semitic had made the earlier statement to try and head off calls for boycott. So in 1934, he changed his approach and argued to keep all “politics” out of the Olympics. However racism transcended politics and much athletics in the American South was segregated so there was some support to keep issues of racism out of the Olympics although it had been introduced in Nazi Germany and the American South in the tryouts and the membership on the Olympic Committees. In 1935 Ernest Lee Jahncke, the American delegate was expelled from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in July 1936 after taking a strong public stand against the Berlin Games {625798}. Based on this statement The IOC pointedly elected Avery Brundage to fill Jahncke's seat. Jahncke is the only member in the 100-year history of the IOC to be ejected. Brundage beat back the boycott movement and the Olympics went on with American Blacks winning many medals to the distress of the Nazis. However, behind the scenes, Brundage worked to have two Jewish runners removed from the American 400 meter relay team where they were overwhelming favorities so that when America won, Hitler would be spared the embarrassment.
Nadia Elena Comăneci Conner, known professionally as Nadia Comăneci, is a Romanian retired gymnast and a five-time Olympic gold medalist, all in individual events. In 1976 at the age of 14, Comăneci was the first gymnast to be awarded a perfect score of 10.0 at the Olympic Games. At the same Games (1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal), she received six more perfect 10s for events en route to winning three gold medals. At the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, Comăneci won two more gold medals and attained two more perfect 10s. During her career, Comăneci won nine Olympic medals and four World Artistic Gymnastics Championship medals.
