Recordig* (for Recording*)

I’m counting down to the 2012 Summer Olympics, but likely not for an event most people are anticipating—I’m a fan of the marathon swim, which was first introduced to the Summer Olympics in 2008. It’s a grueling 10km swim in open water that took nearly two hours for the gold medal winners, leaving them limp-limbed and barely able to climb out of the water. I find their sheer stamina fascinating, though watching the whole event from start to finish on my TV can involve its own form of stamina (and a tape recording just isn’t the same). Gymnastics are more of a crowd favourite, and I can’t but help admire the grace of the competitors. It was on this day, July 18, at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal that Romanian Gymnast Nadia Comăneci (only 14 years old) earned the first perfect 10 score in gymnastics for her routine on the uneven bars. The scoreboards displayed her result as 1.00, momentarily confusing the audience, but it wasn’t an error in recording the decimal point – the scoreboards were actually unable to display 10.0. Recordig, however, is an error, and a fairly common one: it’s a moderate probability typo on the Ballard List.

(Image of Nadia Comăneci courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)

Leanne Olson