Nadia Comanche is considered the perfect gymnast in history because of her fantastic talent and relatively clean injury record. She won 9 Olympic gold medals, 4 at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, and 5 at the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul.

Nadia came out of retirement to compete with Kerri Strug at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta but reinjured her right hamstring while competing in the compulsory round of the preliminaries.

She took bronze at the World Championships in 1991 with an injured patella tendon, for which she refused to take cortisone because she was afraid it would cause a positive test later on. She retired from gymnastics after winning gold at the 1996 Olympics.

Nadia was discovered at a local gymnastics club by Béla and Márta Károlyi. She won 4 World Championships, 6 European Championships, and 4 Olympic gold medals for a total of 12 championships—more than any other female gymnast in history has achieved.

She’s been criticized because she had to wear casts when she was 11 years old, but she said that it helped her concentrate on getting stronger. She’s considered one of the best female gymnasts in history. Despite having some skeletal irregularities, she still beat many other talented gymnasts without any significant injuries or risk of serious injury.

She did have a lot of nagging injuries, but they didn’t hinder her performance. Her hamstring injury in 1996 was probably the worst, but she had been training on a surface that was too hard.

In September 1999, Nadia married her longtime boyfriend Bret Miller and stopped working as a gymnastics coach. In 2000, she gave birth to their daughter Hollie. After the 2004 Olympics, Béla Károlyi retired and Nadia replaced him as the head coach of the women’s team and was also appointed as an adviser to USA Gymnastics.

Nadia is currently the only gymnast to have won gold medals in every world or Olympic competition in which she has competed.

As head coach of the U.S women’s national team, Nadia led the USA women’s team to win their first World Championship since 2003 at the 2007 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships with gymnasts like Nastia Liukin, Samantha Peszek, Alicia Sacramone, and Bridget Sloan. She was also an assistant coach for the 2008 Olympics women’s gymnastics team, winning the gold medal at the Beijing games. She received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2011.

Nadia is considered a significant pioneer in women’s artistic gymnastics. She’s one of only three female artistic gymnasts to have won at least 6 gold medals in a single event at the World Championships, Olympic Games, or both. The other two are Věra Čáslavská and Svetlana Khorkina.