Perfect 10 (gymnastics)
[1][2] Other women who accomplished this feat at the Olympics include Nellie Kim, also in 1976, Mary Lou Retton in 1984, Daniela Silivaș and Yelena Shushunova in 1988, Lu Li and Lavinia Miloșovici in 1992.
[3][4] (However, in the 1924 Paris Olympics, 22 men achieved a mark of 10 in rope-climbing, with Albert Séguin getting a second 10 in the sidehorse vault, events that are no longer part of artistic gymnastics.)
During the post-1952 era, a couple of very early scores, essentially extreme outliers, that came very close to the 10 mark were Armenian-Soviet Hrant Shahinyan's 9.950 on optional rings at the 1952 Olympics and Armenian-Soviet Albert Azaryan's 9.950, also on the optional still rings exercise, at the 1954 World Championships.
[10] Věra Čáslavská of Czechoslovakia was the first gymnast to achieve perfect 10s at a major competition in the post-1952 era, which she did twice at the 1967 European Championships,[11] which were displayed on a manual scoreboard.
[13] This led to confusion, with even Comăneci unsure of what it meant, until the announcer informed the elated crowd that she had scored a perfect 10.
[13] Her main rival, the Soviet Union's Nelli Kim, scored two 10s in the same competition, in the vault and floor exercise.
[19] The code of points came under review as a result of separate incidents during the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, in which gymnasts were believed to have received excessively low scores.
Three possible scenarios in which to create a "meta-perfect score", that have occurred, would then be: 1) to achieve perfect 10s on every apparatus throughout a segment of a competition (Team Compulsories, Team Optionals, or All-Around) which would post an official "meta-perfect" score of either 60 for the men or 40 for the women, depending upon the era and competition; 2) to achieve perfect 10s on all performances on an apparatus throughout every segment of a competition (Team Compulsories, Optionals, All-around, and Event Finals), which would officially post a "meta-perfect" score of 20 in Event Finals, depending upon the era and competition; and 3) to achieve perfect 10s on all optionals performances on an apparatus (team optionals, all-around (if competed in), event finals), which might or might not post an official "meta-perfect" score, depending upon the competition and era – but this is a possibly necessary scenario to articulate because perfect scores of 10 were given much less often to compulsory routines than to optional routines, for a number of reasons.
Svetlana Boginskaya, Nadia Comăneci, Maxi Gnauck, Olga Mostepanova, and Daniela Silivaș are women who have done this more than once.
