Already the publicists’ legend-making machine is spinning. As the story goes, Anita’s mom went into labor during the 1976 Olympic Games and watched Romania’s Nadia Comaneci on television performing her perfect gymnastic routines while she was waiting to deliver. So Anita’s whole name, In honor of the earlier Olympian, is Nadia Anita Louise Nall.
Take her out of the water, though, and Anita is, it’s true, just about as cute as the quick-tanning Cabbage Patch Kids the swimmers will pass out in Barcelona. What does she think of the team? “I think it’s great. It think it’s a 10–it’s an 11,” she says enthusiastically. And how does she feel, being dealt with like everybody’s kid sister? (Janet Evans, the American swimming champ at Seoul, used to call her “Little One.”) “I’m the youngest in my family and I’m kind of used to being treated like that,” says Nall.
