In July 1980, on the eve of the Moscow Olympics, 20-year-old Soviet gymnast Elena Mukhina attempted a new tumbling pass that went fatally wrong, leaving her paralyzed from the neck down. Once one of the brightest stars in world gymnastics — a world all-around champion and a rival even Nadia Comăneci feared — she would spend the next twenty-six years confined to her bed, sustained by the devotion of a few extraordinary friends.
This article, drawn from the recollections of those who cared for her, traces the quiet heroism of a woman whose body was broken but whose spirit never was — a story not only of tragedy, but of endurance, grace, and the humanity that surrounded her until the very end.
“That’s Why God Punished Me…”
The great gymnast who was bedridden for 26 years
A single tumbling pass — the one that fractured a cervical vertebra — broke twenty-year-old Elena Mukhina’s life cleanly in two: before and after.
The famous Soviet gymnast Elena Mukhina died on December 22, 2006, at five o’clock in the evening, in her Moscow apartment near the Petrovsko-Razumovskaya metro station. Her body, exhausted by 26 years of immobility, simply ran out of strength to keep fighting for life. She was only 47 years old.
Life Split in Two
History, as they say, does not tolerate the subjunctive mood. But how one wishes to rewind the film and stop Lena on that fateful day — July 3, 1980, when she decided to train on her own… The day before, someone had brought word from Moscow to the Belarusian training base Stayki, where the national team was having its final pre-Olympic camp: Mukhina wasn’t being included in the Olympic lineup. One of the strongest contenders for the all-around gold — the gymnast even Nadia Comăneci herself admitted to fearing — left off the team? Perhaps it was her slip at the 1979 World Championships, or the autumn injury?
Her tough and ambitious coach, Mikhail Klimenko, immediately rushed to Moscow to defend his pupil. And Lena — as any 20-year-old might have — decided not to waste time.* The never-before-performed element she and her coach believed could be her Olympic trump card — a one-and-a-half backward salto with a 540-degree twist into a forward roll — was what she tried that day.
[*Note: When Mukhina told the story in her own words, she did not express as much agency.]
“I ran, pushed off — and suddenly, as if in a dream, I saw people running toward the mat. Only later did I realize they were running to me. I wanted to get up, but I couldn’t, though my head was clear. I wanted to move my arm, but I couldn’t. And then, from somewhere, the thought came: this must be a catastrophe. They brought me to the hospital, waved smelling salts under my nose, but I was fully conscious and turned my head — ‘Don’t give me that…’” Later, already in the Moscow hospital, Lena told this story to one of the people closest to her — the senior coach of the Moscow gymnastics team, Tamara Andreevna Zhaleeva, who would remain her dearest friend for the rest of her life.
That fatal tumbling run, which broke her neck, split the 20-year-old girl’s life cleanly in half — into before and after.
And the “after” lasted 26 years.
“People Don’t Live Long in Such a Condition”
Recalled by Tamara Zhaleeva, Honored Coach of the USSR, world champion (1954, team event):
“On the evening of July 3, 1980, I got a call from Minsk. They said that Lena had fallen awkwardly during training and strained her back muscles. As it turned out later, they wanted to spare my nerves so that I could sleep peacefully that night. Of course, the call worried me, but not enough to dramatize the situation. Lena had accustomed us to her injuries (the most recent had been in the autumn of 1979, during an exhibition in England, when she broke her leg) and to the fact that she was always ready to compete despite any of them. That fatal tumbling pass, by the way, she also performed with an unhealed ankle injury, which prevented her from pushing off properly…
I learned the truth about what had really happened at the Stayki base only on the morning of the 4th. I still can’t shake the thought that things might have turned out differently for Lena if she’d been operated on not three days after the accident, but the very next day. But what’s the use of talking about it now…
We met her at Belorussky Station when, two weeks after the surgery, Lena was brought to Moscow. Her motionless body was carried out through the train window — God forbid, not to harm her any further.
She spent about a year in the spinal department of the 19th City Clinical Hospital on Krasnaya Presnya, and then insisted — quite categorically — on going home. No, not out of despair or hopelessness! She never had a defeatist attitude. She believed in the future; throughout all 26 years she spent completely immobilized, she never lost hope that she would someday stand up and walk again. At the very least, I never once saw her in a depressive state, though at some point, I think, Lena began to realize that the miracle would not happen. But she never said that aloud…
After her death, one journalist wrote — supposedly quoting me — that in her final days Lena often thought about death, about where and how she should be buried. It was very painful to read that, because it wasn’t true! I could never have said that, because Lena herself never spoke of such things. Only once, about four months before her death, I asked her, ‘Lena, why have you been sick all the time this year? Come on, that’s enough already…’ And she suddenly replied, ‘Tamara Andreevna, I’ve been lying here for 26 years. People don’t live long in such a condition.’ But even that, she said with a smile — as if to say, don’t worry, I’ll get through it…
She lived a full life despite her injury. She read a great deal, catching up on everything she hadn’t had time for while she was an athlete. CSKA, the club Lena competed for, installed a satellite television dish in her apartment, and she never missed an interesting program — let alone a gymnastics broadcast. She was completely up to date with everything happening in our sport. She constantly analyzed things, had an opinion about everything. She even tried to suggest to some gymnasts certain elements to include in their routines, or music for their floor exercises.
Lidiya Gavrilovna Ivanova, the Olympic champion of 1956 and 1960, who was often invited to commentate gymnastics competitions, said that, after each broadcast, Lena would invariably call her, and they would spend a long time discussing the performances of our gymnasts.
Bedridden, she finished the Institute of Physical Culture and defended her candidate’s dissertation (PhD).”
Learning to Stand Again
Told by Nina Lebedeva, specialist in therapeutic gymnastics and massage at the spinal unit of City Hospital No. 19:
Professor Arkady Vladimirovich Livshits, a world-renowned neurosurgeon (he worked at our hospital before emigrating to Israel), operated on Mukhina. He flew to Minsk specifically for that purpose. He called from there and said that the operation had gone well. “Well” in this case meant that her life had been saved.
At that moment the question really was: would Lena live or not? She had suffered an anatomical rupture—a fracture of the cervical vertebrae with spinal-cord damage. In other words, by the time of surgery, irreversible processes had already begun. Later, I often heard people say that the operation shouldn’t have been done, that it would have been enough to take Mukhina to the Poltava region to the famous doctor Kasyan—he would have “set the vertebrae” and that would have been that. Nonsense! An anatomical rupture, I repeat, is not just an injury to the vertebral column. With such a trauma, the victim is doomed to immobility, and without surgery—to certain death.
As soon as Lena was transferred to our department, we began working with her: learning to stand again, to sit again, to hold herself up—fighting desperately for her life, because in patients who remain constantly in a horizontal position, even the kidneys begin to fail… But you know what struck me first of all? Her hands. I had never before seen such fragile, childlike little hands (at twenty she looked fifteen) covered with enormous “work” calluses.
Lena was practically motionless. It was like something out of a science-fiction novel about Professor Dowell’s Head: only the slightest movements of the shoulder joints, and even those caused her sharp pain. There was barely perceptible life in the elbows.
From that starting point we began to work—with pain and tears, with her innate stubbornness and her capricious nature. We worked to restore the joints, because if you don’t move them, they become fused. And still—it’s easy to imagine Lena’s reaction when, for example, yet another spoonful of soup spilled over her as she tried to feed herself.
[Note: The Head of Professor Dowell is a 1925 science-fiction novel by Alexander Belyaev about a brilliant surgeon who keeps his deceased mentor’s severed head alive and uses the forbidden experiment to pursue his own unethical ambitions.]
The Most Important Thing: People
Told by Tamara Zhaleeva:
Total immobility for twenty-six years! She could neither sit nor stand. She couldn’t even hold a spoon on her own. It’s hard to imagine that anyone could survive so long in such a condition if she hadn’t been cared for all those years. But from the very first day, Lena was not left alone with her tragedy. The CSKA sports club, the USSR and Moscow sports committees all took part in helping her. In particular, through the intervention of the Moscow City Council, her one-room apartment on Chasovaya Street was quickly exchanged for a two-room apartment near the Petrovsko-Razumovskaya metro station.
This new apartment was adapted for her needs through collective effort. A special ramp was built to the balcony so she could be taken outside for fresh air. They bought her a bed with an anti-bedsore mattress and a wheelchair. When Lena began exercising under the Valentin Dikul rehabilitation system, they even installed a special training device. In time, alongside her disability pension, she was also granted a personal presidential allowance.
But the most important thing, of course, was the people who were always by her side, surrounding her with daily care. Lena had lost her mother when she was only three years old [in a fire]. Her relationship with her father, who had started another family, was—let’s put it gently—strained. And it was naturally impossible for her seventy-year-old grandmother, Anna Ivanovna, to care for a paralyzed granddaughter alone.
Lidiya Ivanova, who at that time was the national coach for artistic gymnastics, appealed to the leadership of the First Medical Institute with a request to assign some students—nursing volunteers—to look after Mukhina. Many responded to the Komsomol call: Nina, Sima, Galya… These girls, even after graduating from the institute, stayed with Lena until the very end of her life.
A Day, or a Lie?
Told by Nina Lebedeva:
In the mid-1980s, the Valentin Dikul rehabilitation method appeared, and I liked it very much. It offered, in particular, the hope of preserving the function of the shoulder joint for many years by strengthening it through athletic-style exercises. But alas, with Lena this method didn’t work, although she began it with almost fanatical enthusiasm. She saw it as her last real hope. Yet the heavy physical strain required by Dikul’s method (and I, to be honest, was still trying to go easy on Lena) once again caused kidney problems, so we had to abandon it…
And barely a day later, one of the popular newspapers published an interview with Valentin Dikul in which he supposedly claimed that his method had failed only because it encountered… Elena’s laziness. I know Valentin Ivanovich very well — there’s no way he could have said such a thing!
Speaking of publications… Why was Lena once mortally offended by journalists? I never spoke to her directly about it, but I can only assume it happened after I began laying her on her stomach for the first time. Half an hour on her stomach, propped up on her elbows, her head slightly tilted back — the pain was unbearable. On the days we did these procedures, the ward resembled a torture chamber. The screams were like those from a Gestapo cellar. But this was one of those cases when you have to cause pain for good — to keep the joints, as we say, from “gluing together.”
So once, while Lena was sobbing, I placed a scrap of newspaper in front of her so she wouldn’t soak the sheets with tears. And just as the poor girl, as they say, merged with the pain — reaching that “dead point” where the body seems to stop feeling — a journalist suddenly peeked into the room. Where had he come from? The hospital had strict visitor controls! And a few days later an article appeared describing how “the bright April sun shines through the window, and Lena Mukhina, comfortably reclining on her hospital bed, resting her head on her hands, reads the latest issue of the newspaper…”
After the accident, she avoided any kind of publicity. She erased many people from her life, leaving only those closest to her. She feared that the most private part of her life might one day be laid bare — that someone might walk in and see her helplessness, her paralyzed hands, once her pride.
In the hospital, she immediately surrounded herself with an invisible yet very solid wall, barely speaking to the other patients. At the same time, they helped her without even realizing it: seeing them, I think, made things easier for her, because they didn’t have even a tenth of what she once had. And yet she — she was flown to the spinal center in the Crimean town of Saki on a special military plane. She could put things in perspective.
I remember 1982, when then-IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch expressed a wish to visit Lena at home to present her with the International Olympic Order. What an insane amount of stress she went through! We spent two days choosing a blouse that would hide her hands…
“I’m Not Sick!”
In her later years, Lena turned to religion and deeply regretted that earlier no one had been able to explain to her, in a way she could understand, the things that mattered most to her. Only through reading special literature did she come to realize that God had not wronged her — that he makes only those he loves suffer. She became fascinated by philosophy, astrology, and parapsychology; lying in bed, she searched for ways to save both herself and others. She sincerely came to believe that God had granted her healing powers, and for a time, she even received people who came to her for help.
Told by Nina Lebedeva:
One day she suddenly said to me, “I don’t consider myself sick. I’m not sick, because I feel very comfortable. And who’s to say whether it’s bad or good that this happened to me… If it hadn’t been for this injury, maybe worse things would have happened. Many years ago, I was walking along Leningradka on my way to training, and a girl with cerebral palsy came up to me asking for an autograph. I was in a bad mood and brushed her off — I said, ‘Go away, freak!’ That’s why God punished me…”
Can you imagine — she carried that memory inside her for so many years…
“Lena, Bound to Her in Spirit”
Told by Tamara Zhaleeva:
Since the year 2000, Lena had been constantly cared for by her namesake, Lena Gurina — also a former gymnast, with whom she had once performed. Gurina had a family, but, after separating from her husband, she devoted herself entirely to her friend. She was her soul sister. I once asked her, “Lenochka, isn’t it hard for you?” She said, “No. On the contrary, it feels good to be needed by Lenka. I think my life has gained more meaning and light because I’m helping her…”
They were very close. Besides their spiritual bond, they, as former gymnasts, shared common interests. And in the end, Lena died in her arms.
I visited them on the 21st, and Lenochka Gurina said, “Lena’s asleep. She asked not to be woken.” So I left without saying goodbye. Nothing foretold trouble, though my heart ached a little. And the next day, Lena Mukhina was gone…
The Last Day of a Great Gymnast
On the morning of December 22, Lena woke up and told her friend that she wasn’t feeling well:
“My strength is leaving me.”
“Maybe you should eat something?” Gurina suggested.
“I don’t want to. Just give me some water.”
She drank a little and closed her eyes, as if trying to fall asleep again — just as she always did when she was unwell. But toward noon, Lena began slowly to fade away. Her breathing grew labored. Gurina called emergency services and tried to help on her own. She began massaging Lena’s hands, as one does in cases of heart failure, but there was no improvement. The doctors, when they arrived, could do nothing either…
Tamara Zhaleeva told me about the gymnast’s final day, recounting what she had heard from Gurina herself, and she insisted that I not try to contact or seek out Elena [Gurina].
“She would refuse an interview anyway,” said Tamara Andreevna. “Long ago, after being hurt by journalists, Lena Mukhina promised herself that she would never speak to them again — and she asked Gurina not to tell anyone anything either. Lena gave her word, and she would never, under any circumstances, break a promise. I know that…”
Source: Sovetsky Sport
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