Forty years ago, at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, Nadia Comaneci, a tiny, slender Romanian gymnast, was preparing to wow a worldwide audience.

At the Games in Rio, gymnasts will once again be among the brightest, most celebrated stars. Some of them will, no doubt, earn appreciation similar to what Nadia Comaneci received in 1976.

But no matter how spectacularly they perform, no matter how much appreciation they receive, none of the gymnasts in Rio will earn what Nadia got: a “perfect 10.” Which is not to say that on that day at the Games in 1976, Nadia Comaneci didn’t deserve that score.

Perfect 10 — A Flawed Number

"For her time and for that day, there was no one better, and no one could have done it better," said Hardy Fink, one of the judges that day.

It was Fink's first time judging an Olympic competition. He is also a former gymnast, and he’s currently the director of education programs for the International Gymnastics Federation. But even as he was judging Nadia and finding no reason to deduct even the smallest fraction of a point from her performance, he was convinced that the "perfect 10" was a flawed number — and that the digits below it had problems, too. That conviction began when Fink was still performing as a gymnast for Canada, and watching his more accomplished competitor, Eizo Kenmotsu of Japan.

"He was so far ahead of everyone else with what he could do, just in pure difficulty — the first triple twist on floor and this incredibly complex horizontal bar routine he did without any intermediate or intervening small elements," Fink recalled.

Flourishes didn’t count extra. In those days, the idea was to fulfill the required elements without making mistakes.

"I could do the minimum requirements and if I performed perfectly I would have got a 10," Fink explained. "And he did so much more than me, and all he could get was a 10. He couldn’t even get a 10.1 to show he was better than me."

Fink thought that was unfair. In fact, he told me he thought it was insane. And just a few years after Nadia’s "perfect 10" made her the darling of those ’76 Olympics, Fink was proved right.

'It Became Stupidity'

"The 80s saw this tremendous spike in 10s," said gymnastics writer Dvora Meyers.

She argues that the 10 was doomed by the proliferation of allegedly perfect performances.

"The difficulty really, really escalated in the 1980s, and what I think happened was that the judges were, in a sense, searching for ways to reward innovation," Meyers said. "But all the scores are capped at 10."

Sometimes, as in the men’s finals at the 1981 Gymnastics World Championships in Moscow, the judges backed themselves into awarding 10s.

"I remember finals on the pommel horse -- Hungarian head judge," Fink said. "Hungarian gymnast ends up with a routine that everyone knew could be beaten and received a 10. First guy up on the pommel horse. And then almost everyone who went after him in the finals was better, so it was 10, 10, 10, 10. In '88 we had a three-way tie on pommel horse again with 10s. So it became stupidity."