Nadia Comăneci

Nadia Comăneci was born in Onești, a small industrial town in Romania. She was six when the coach Béla Károlyi spotted her cartwheeling in a school playground and recruited her into his experimental gymnastics school. The training was brutal and the food was scarce, but she was fearless and unusually strong for her size.

At the Montreal Olympics in 1976, aged 14 and weighing under 40 kilos, she performed a routine on the uneven bars that the judges scored a perfect 10, the first in Olympic history. The scoreboard, built to show only three digits, displayed 1.00. She scored six more 10s that week and won three golds. She was suddenly the most famous teenager in the world.

At home, fame meant being watched. The Ceaușescu regime treated her as state property, monitored her movements, and after she won two more golds in Moscow in 1980 refused to let her travel. She went through a period of eating problems and, at 15, had drunk bleach after a row, which she later described as a cry for attention rather than a serious attempt on her life.

In November 1989, a few weeks before the revolution that toppled Ceaușescu, she walked through the night across the border into Hungary with a small group and made her way to Austria and then the United States. She married the American gymnast Bart Conner and now runs a gymnastics academy in Oklahoma.