She is into the model stage of her life now. That and the celebrity video workout stage. Nadia Comaneci is 31 years old and still perfecting new routines. It is why she says of her life to date, "it seems like more than 31 years I think," and also why she continues to resist any and all efforts by producers who would give their last three Golden Globe awards to get the movie rights to "Nadia."
Who has time to recap? To work with the script writers so they get it right? To go on location back to Romania and find the kindergarten playground in her hometown where Bela Karolyi first saw her hanging by her knees? To re-create the crowd scene in the Montreal Forum in 1976 when she dismounted from her first routine, the uneven bars, and the Olympic judges sat there stunned, having never seen a perfect routine before that one? And, after all that, to accurately capture the chill of the border crossing into Hungary, Nadia on her hands and knees, escaping from Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania with the quietest dismount of them all?Not Nadia. Not yet. She's got an appearance tomorrow in Salt Lake City, at ZCMI's downtown store pitching "Jockey For Her" underwear, and, after that, some step aerobic appearances in Europe where her video "Nadia's Perfect 10 Workout" has of course preceded her. Then there's the gymnastics school she co-runs in Norman, Okla., with her live-in boy friend, 1984 Olympic gold medalist Bart Conner, and homes in both Norman and Los Angeles to keep dusted.
"There is no time for boredom," she says, let alone a movie.
She does, however, know who she'd choose to play her if there was a movie.
"What about Winona Ryder?" she says. "I think that she looks a lot like me. And she's already been in Romania and done Dracula."Not that there are any similarities.
And not that Winona Ryder would have to do the gymnastics routines.
"I think they could use the old footage," Nadia says.
She uses the word "old" comfortably, as one who hasn't chosen to live in the past. She has lived more life since her first "10" in Montreal - and the six other "10's" she recorded in those Olympic Games - than she lived before it, and in another couple of months she will celebrate her fourth year of living in freedom. Gold medals illuminate lives but they don't stop time.
She talks as casually and matter-of-factly now about her performance in Montreal as she did 17 years ago, when the 14-year-old daughter of a Romanian mechanic unabashedly turned Olga Korbut, the darling of Munich, into a warmup act. She was well prepared, she was well coached, why shouldn't she be perfect? She insists that if she knew then what she knows now - just how much was riding on those routines, just what it would mean to her life - it wouldn't have altered history. "That wouldn't have changed anything," she says, "I still would have been me."
As it is, Nadia Comaneci in Montreal '76 stands up there with the most memorable Olympic moments of all time, with Jesse Owens' long jump in Berlin in 1936, with Abebe Bikila's barefoot marathon in Rome in 1960, with Jim Thorpe's decathlon in Stockholm in 1912, with Paavo Nurmi's distance runs in Paris in 1924.
"It was the time when the people in the world found out about me," says Nadia. "It will always be the most important moment in my life."
Although it was far from the most frightening.
"In Montreal I was not really afraid," she says. "I think that's probably why I was able to make it. Even the balance beam was not a problem for me."
"But when I crossed the border, then I was afraid. There was a point where I didn't know if I would make it or not."
Tired of the oppression of one of history's most ruthless dictators, Romania's most famous Olympian chose a dark night in the fall of 1989 just days after her 28th birthday to crawl through mud and ice and escape across the border into Hungary. A year later the iron curtain would start to fall, by which time Nadia was in the United States, welcoming the news.
She says she will take a long visit to Romania one day, and she's looking forward to that, but for now, she isn't looking back to where she's been nearly as much as where she's going. She's a model now, and she has shoots to do and ads to pose for. It's not as easy as it looks. But it does suit her. They keep doing them until they're perfect.