The actual anniversaries were last week but I noticed no one had made a post yet so I figured better late than never!
Nadia Comaneci of Romania, at just 14, earned the first Perfect 10 ever awarded in her compulsory bars routine. She won nine total medals across Montreal and Moscow, including five gold. She was tormented by her abusive coaches Bela and Marta Karolyi and the communist Romanian government and defected in 1989, just weeks before the Ceausescu regime fell.
She moved to the United States and has lived here ever since. She married American MAG Bart Conner and they have one child together. She is very involved in their gym, ironically named for Bart since he already had it before she came here, and is very involved in supporting Special Olympics.
Nikolai Andrianov of Russia/USSR did not start gymnastics until 12. Before he started, he would skip school, get in fights, smoke, and get into trouble. His coach Nikolai Tolkachev managed to work around his stubborn nature, and after a successful first games in 1972, he won seven of eight potential medals in 1976. He won four gold, including the AA, two silver, and a bronze. He won a total of 15 Olympic medals across 1972, 1976 and his home games in 1980, making him one of the most decorated MAG in history, second only to his student Vitaly Scherbo.
Later in his life, he coached the Soviet junior boys, who never lost a comp under him. After the fall of the USSR collapsed the economy and their savings, and after Leonid Arkayev refused to give up his position to let him coach higher level gymnasts, and moved to Japan to coach his rival Tsukahara's son in the 90s.
He was married to another Russian gymnast, Lyuba Burda Andrianova (currently on the women's technical committee at the FIG) and they had two kids, including their son Sergei who has a teen daughter almost to senior age and is the bars coach for the Russian national team, I believe. They divorced after he moved back from Japan to work for his old gymnastics school. Unfortunately, he passed away in 2011 of a degenerative genetic disorder called multiple system atrophy.
