When Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci scored a perfect 10 in 1976, it redefined the concept of perfection. She became the darling of those Olympic Games, and for a brief moment, national borders and lingering Cold War hostilities disappeared and people all over the world fell in love with her. As the sport’s most decorated gymnast, with 14 career perfect scores to her name, Comaneci is still one of the most revered athletes of all time.
And yet, as anyone who has ever watched an Olympic gymnastics competition knows, scoring in the sport is wildly complicated and far from transparent. This summer, American gymnast Simone Biles is expected to push her competitors even higher than they have gone before, but her scores are likely to elicit an eye roll from the millions of viewers tuning in. And it’s not just that the current system isn’t intuitive or easy to understand; it’s also that it’s not fair.
Fortunately, former gymnast and journalist Dvora Meyers is here to help. With her book The End of the Perfect 10, Meyers is aiming to help fans understand what happened to perfect scores in gymnastics and why the system needs to change. Her book is exhaustively researched, thoughtfully woven, and (unsurprisingly for a gymnastics book) deeply intellectual—which is an accomplishment in a genre that’s mostly populated by frilly ghostwritten biographies and gritty tell-all memoirs. Meyers interviewed just about everyone but Martha and Bela Karolyi (never a bad idea) and managed to dig up some surprising stories, from how Biles’s coaches helped her become such an incredible competitor to why the guy who conceived the current scoring system grew up to be an engineer.
The first surprise in Meyers’ book is that even Nadia Comaneci wasn’t really a perfect 10. The scoreboard that day, the one that flummoxed Olympic officials by showing a “1.00” instead of a ten, miscalculated her routine slightly; it appears she missed a handspring forward on her last move. She racked up six more perfect 10s, though, and they made her a household name, transcending the sport.
Meyers’ other revelations are just as compelling. She explains why the sport’s earliest superstars—like Comaneci, Karolyi, and Mary Lou Retton—could have scored perfect tens while later legends like McKayla Maroney and Bart Conner failed to do so. She explains how the sport’s scoring systems evolved from simple, easy-to-understand evaluations to overly mathematical algorithms with five digits after the decimal point. And she reveals how the ideal of perfection morphed from the flawless uneven bars routine that earned Comaneci her first perfect ten into the seemingly impossible vault launched by Biles in 2016.
The End of the Perfect 10 is, ultimately, a celebration of the human capacity for achievement and of gymnastics as the perfect vehicle for it. With its smarts, heart, and utterly unpretentious prose, it’s a gem of a book. And this summer, when the gymnastics world descends on Rio, Meyers’ book will help spectators reclaim the perfect 10. For all its flaws and inconsistencies, it still feels like the most honest way to evaluate a truly spectacular performance.
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