How it unfolded
In the team competition, the 17-year-old Korbut performed a move on uneven bars in which she stood on the high bar, did a backward flip, and caught the bar again — a skill that would later be known as the Korbut Flip, and one that existed in no rulebook at the time. Viewers across Europe and North America saw for the first time that gymnastics could look like this. But her competition was far from smooth: in the all-around final her uneven bars routine fell apart, scoring 7.5 and dropping her to seventh place, and cameras caught her sobbing on the bench live. The following day, in the apparatus finals, she won both beam and floor and added a silver on uneven bars. The collapse and comeback, broadcast in full across just 24 hours, made Korbut an overnight global figure. The all-around title went to her Soviet teammate Lyudmila Turischeva, but the name people remembered after the Games was Korbut's. Her uneven bars move was later banned for safety reasons.
Why it still matters
The turning point that transformed gymnastics from a specialist sport into one of the Olympics' most popular events. It was the first case of broadcast cameras following mistakes and tears as closely as success, and the sport's storytelling has been built around personalities rather than scores ever since. Gym registrations across the United States and Western Europe spiked immediately after the Games, and the global attention Nadia Comaneci received four years later was possible only because Korbut had built the viewing habit first.