Gymnastics show Tumble bounded onto our screens this weekend with ten eager celebrities striving for the perfect 10.

But sitting in judgement over them is the first person in the world ever to actually achieve a perfect 10 in the Olympic games - Romanian champion Nadia Comaneci.

She's a legend in gymnastics circles, but might be a new face to the average viewer of Saturday evening TV.

So here's everything you need to know about Tumble's star judge, Nadia Comaneci.

Where's she from?

Romanian: Nadia defected to the US in 1989 (
Image:
Alex Grimm)

Head judge Nadia hails from Romania, where she was born in 1961.

She began gymnastics at nursery school, and by age 6 she was chosen to attend a specialist gymnastics school.

She competed in her in her first national championship aged just 8, was competing internationally at 9 and competed in the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal aged 14 - but more of that later.

She retired from competetive gymnastics after the 1984 Olympic games. After a series of competition and exhibition trips to the United States, she'd come under close scrutiny from the Romanian government. She was forbidden to leave the country for any reason other than for gymnastics.

In 1989 she defected from Romania to the United States, shortly before the revolution. She later married former American Gymnast Bart Conner, and returned to Romania in 1996 after the fall of communism. Their wedding was broadcast live on Romanian television.

She now has dual American and Romanian citizenship.

She's a perfect 10?

The perfect 10: Nadia Comaneci stands alongside the scoreboard recording the first ever perfect score for a female gymnast in Olympic history (
Image:
AFP)

She was the first gymnast ever to achieve a perfect 10 score in the Olympic Games, on the uneven bars. She received seven perfect scores and three gold medals.

Because the scoreboard manufacturers had been told a perfect 10 was impossible, the readouts only had one digit, and her perfect score was displayed as 1.0s

Over her career she took home a total of five Olympic gold medals, three silver medals and a bronze.

How do you pronounce her name?

Craig Heap, Nadia Comaneci, Louis Smith and Sebastien Stella (
Image:
BBC)

Nadia doesn't pronounce the i at the end of her name - meaning it's pronounced Comanech...and leading to this superb joke.