In the mid-1980s, Olga Mostepanova was the Soviet team’s golden child—the gymnast who achieved the impossible: a perfect 40.000 at the 1984 Friendship Games, the alternate Olympics for the boycotting socialist nations. Then, just as suddenly as she appeared, she was gone. After Yelena Shushunova replaced her in the all-around at the 1985 world championships, her dazzling career was extinguished almost overnight. (I discuss this more in the introduction to her 1989 interview.)
When Sovetsky Sport caught up with her in 1998, she was no longer the teenage prodigy who floated through beam routines but a mother of four, balancing domestic life with memories of an extraordinary, abbreviated rise. In this interview, Mostepanova reflects on the pressures of early fame, the injuries that ended her career, and the secret that allowed her to start it so young: a falsified birth certificate. Like other gymnasts of her generation, her age was quietly “adjusted” so she could compete at the senior level before the rules allowed.
What emerges here is not only a portrait of one of gymnastics’ most luminous talents, but also a human story—about ambition, obedience, and the cost of being perfect in a system built on illusions.
Note: In a 2008 interview with International Gymnast, she stated that she had never given an interview about her age before: “I can respond to anyone who says that my age was changed. It was. But I never discussed that in any interview, official or unofficial.” That calls into question the authenticity of this interview. That said, both interviews confirm the same birthdate: January 3, 1969.
