OLYMPICS: The Games: Up in the Air

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From the opening days of the XXI Olympiad, the athletes performed so stunningly that the scorekeeping computers had to be reprogrammed to process the data of perfection. Shattering eight world records in their first nine finals, East Germany's women and America's men proved themselves the greatest swimmers the world has seen since mankind's forebears forsook the primeval ooze. In one 27-minute period, East Germany's incomparable Kornelia Ender, 17, won two gold medals. Meanwhile the U.S. men obliterated all opposition; their totals in the first five days' nine events: nine golds.

But it was not the swimmers who provided the opening week of the Montreal Olympics with their reigning deity. That huge mantle fell upon the tiny shoulders of Nadia Comaneci, who electrified the crowds and bollixed the computers by compiling the first perfect gymnastic scores. Performing her bold and difficult routines with consummate control, Comaneci (pronounced Com-a-netch) tallied three 10s in the team competition, two in the individual all-around contest, and two in the individual-apparatus competition—showings good enough to win her three gold medals, one silver and one bronze. Whether doing backflips on the beam or rocketing herself around the uneven bars, the deceptively frail-looking sprite (she watches her diet strictly—no junk food) was so much in her element that the audience had no more fear of her falling than of a fish drowning. ABC's Jim McKay, offering television's best-turned phrase of the week, described her as "swimming in an ocean of air." Reassured by Nadia's self-confidence, the sellout crowds (scalpers got $200 for $16 tickets) gasped not in apprehension but with delight and awe. Indeed, Nadia seemed as at home on the balance beam as Br'er Rabbit was in the brier patch—hopping about as if she were born there.

Said Frank Bare, executive director of the U.S. Gymnastics Federation: "The tiny point spreads she won by don't begin to indicate how much better she is than her nearest rivals. There has never been anyone like her, never been anyone who approaches her."

Comaneci's achievements seemed so effortless that it was easy to forget she was not merely doing what comes naturally. Although her debut in senior international competition came only last year, when she leaped out of Rumanian obscurity to take the European Championship away from the Soviet Union's five-time winner, Ludmilla Turishcheva, 23, Nadia had been preparing for last week's moment of golden triumph for more than half her life.

Born in Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, a city of 60,000 in the Carpathian Mountains, Comaneci began her training with Béla Károlyi and his wife Marta, the gymnastic coaches at a special sports lycée in her home town. They had spotted her frolicking in a kindergarten playground and been impressed by her lack of fear. She was six years old. "At first it was like a game," said Nadia last week, showing no trace of nostalgia for those presumably more carefree days. "But by the age of eight," Coach Károlyi noted, "the students must be serious about gymnastics." Asked if Comaneci was exceptional then, he answers: "Many were. The important thing is that she is exceptional now."