What the scoreboard displayed. It is on the print exactly as the arena saw it.
Why the board could not show it
Omega supplied the timing and scoring equipment for the Montreal Games. During specification, the question of whether the gymnastics boards needed to display a maximum score of 10.00 was put to the International Gymnastics Federation.
The answer was that a perfect ten had never been awarded in Olympic competition and did not need to be accommodated. The displays were built with three digits.
18 July 1976
Nadia Comaneci, fourteen, competing for Romania in the team compulsory exercises at the Montreal Forum, performed on the uneven bars.
The judges awarded a perfect score. The board showed 1.00.
The delay before the crowd understood is audible in the broadcast recordings.
The Games
Comaneci received seven perfect tens in Montreal.
She won gold in the individual all-around, on the balance beam and on the uneven bars; bronze on the floor; and silver in the team competition behind the Soviet Union.
She was the youngest Olympic all-around champion, a record that cannot now be broken.
The coaches
She had been selected by Bela Karolyi at six, at a school in Onesti, reportedly after he watched her doing cartwheels in a playground.
The training regime in the Romanian programme has since been described, by Comaneci and by others, as extreme.
What changed
The minimum age for Olympic gymnastics was subsequently raised, and stands at sixteen in the competition year.
Scoreboards were rebuilt. The ten itself was abolished as a maximum in 2006, when the code of points moved to an open-ended difficulty score plus execution.
After Montreal
Comaneci competed at Moscow in 1980, winning two further golds. Her later years in Romania involved close surveillance and control.
In November 1989 she crossed into Hungary on foot and defected, six weeks before the Romanian revolution and the execution of Nicolae Ceausescu. She settled in the United States.
Why it goes on a wall
Because the object that failed is the point. The equipment had been built to a specification that formally stated the limit of the possible, and a fourteen year old went past it on a Sunday afternoon.
The board had no room.