The End of the Perfect 10

May 30, 2016
Meyers, a former gymnast who writes on sports for ESPN and Slate, offers this sterile history of women’s gymnastics from 1976, when the first perfect score of 10 was awarded, and 2003, when the last 10 was given. Meyers has facts and data and quotes aplenty, but what she is missing is the heartbeat of a story. Gymnastics is a sport full of intrigue, plots, and characters—tiny young girls driven to perfection and the coaches and parents who drive them—and yet only readers who care a great deal about filling gaps in their knowledge of the sport will enjoy it. For everyone else, here’s the gist: routines in elite-level gymnastics used to be scored on a scale of 1–10. Nadia Comaneci earned that first 10 on the uneven bars at the 1976 Olympics. Scandals, controversy, and accusations of political bias followed over the next years as many imperfect routines were given 10s. After an especially messy 2004 Olympics, elite gymnastics adopted an open-ended scoring system. The book has tremendous detail, but wading through it is tedious.