In the decades following her retirement from competition, Larisa Latynina remained one of the defining voices in gymnastics. Her perspective was shaped not only by her record-breaking athletic career but also by her years as head coach of the Soviet women’s team. In this interview, she reflects on the changing face of the sport she once dominated—its increasing demands, the fleeting brilliance of its stars, and the challenges of nurturing talent in a system that can just as easily overlook it.
The conversation that follows offers not only a glimpse into the technical and organizational workings of Soviet gymnastics, but also into the enduring spirit of a champion who enjoyed the thrill of victory but also believed that gymnastics could be for everyone, even those who might not become an Olympic champion like her.
Olympische Sommerspiele in Rom, Turnen: Larissa Latynina UdSSR
In the late 1980s, Soviet sports journalists published a series of interviews with the athletes who had defined Soviet gymnastics. As we’ll see, again and again, the conversation returned to the same lament: gymnastics, they argued, was losing its artistry. The next generation, though technically dazzling, was seen as less feminine, less expressive, and less capable of embodying the emotional depth that the stars of the 1960s and 1970s considered essential to the discipline. To modern eyes, the 1980s may seem like the pinnacle of artistry, but to those who had come before, it already represented a decline.
Against that backdrop, Olga Korbut — the gymnast who had electrified Munich in 1972 and inspired fan clubs — looked back on her career and forward to the future of gymnastics. By the time of this interview, she had stepped away from competition and begun coaching the Belarusian national team. Still, she remained outspoken about what she believed the sport needed: more beauty, more femininity, more emotionality. What follows is a conversation that captures both Korbut’s candor and her conviction that gymnastics must always be more than acrobatics — it must be poetry in motion.
Bildnummer: 09389193 Datum: 31.08.1972 Copyright: imago/Pressefoto Baumann Olympische Spiele München 1972 , Turnen Frauen Olga KORBUT (UdSSR); Olympia Sommerspiele Sommer Spiele München 1972 Kunstturnen xmk yoh hoch Aufmacher
“Let’s do this without any sensationalism,” Elena Mukhina said in her 1989 interview with Sovetsky Sport. “I’m tired of sensationalism. I live like any other disabled person, and there’s nothing sensational in such a life.”
In the nine years that had passed since her accident—nine years since that summer when she was twenty and the Olympics opened without her—urban legends had grown like weeds: about the tumbling pass, about the coaches, about a miracle recovery. She knew them all, and she knew they weren’t true. “So much has been said,” she remarked.
The article that follows takes those urban legends one by one, stripping them down to their core. Legend One asks who was to blame: the coach who pushed too hard, the head coach who couldn’t stand his ground, or the gymnast herself, who had tried to speak but was not heard. It considers the diuretic that may have stripped calcium as ruthlessly as the system stripped agency, and the silence that followed. Legend Two turns to Valentin Dikul, the rehabilitation specialist whose name became shorthand for salvation, and to Mukhina’s refusal of treatment—born not of despair but of realism about her own body, already worn thin. Legend Three dismantles the rumor mill that insisted “Mukhina walks,” a myth that traveled across the globe.
What she offered instead of myth was testimony, calm and unsentimental. “You can’t trample over someone’s individuality for the sake of a medal,” she said. Her words came not as an indictment shouted from a podium but as the lived truth of someone who had already paid the price. In the wake of her injury, she described the sense of release: “Immediately, I felt freedom. Freedom from a coach’s dictatorship, freedom from everything. It was an extraordinary, almost joyful feeling.” That joy, however, was short-lived, and harsh realities followed. Yet out of that reckoning emerged a different kind of clarity. “I began to value human decency as a great gift,” she said. “Unfortunately, it is rare.”
What follows is a translation of her 1989 interview with Sovetsky Sport. Decades later, it remains as poignant as ever. As her interviewer, Natalia Kalugina, wrote in closing: “When I look at today’s champions, I think: God, may nothing happen to these girls! May their coaches hear them and understand them!”
Moscow, USSR. April 26, 1978. Soviet gymnast Yelena Mukhina performs on the balance beam at Moscow News. Igor Utkin, Alexander Yakovlev/TASS
Note: In my translation, I’ve preserved the bold typeface from the original publication.
On July 3, 1980, inside the Minsk Sports Palace, Elena Mukhina attempted a skill she had never mastered. “The injury was inevitable anyway,” she would say in her first interview after her accident. “Not necessarily on that day. It seems to me they would have carried me away from the competition floor sooner or later because I just couldn’t do that element.” Her coach was out of town. The home Olympics were days away. And the doctors wouldn’t protect her because, as she insisted, they “don’t serve health, they serve sport.”
Mukhina described running laps on a leg that hadn’t healed to shed weight, arriving at the gym two hours early, exhausting herself before training even began. “I was stupid. I really wanted to justify their trust, to be a heroine.” When she fell for the last time, her first thought was relief: “Thank God, I won’t make it to the Olympics.”
She came to see her story less as a personal tragedy than as evidence of a culture that exploited children’s small vision of the world. “If only we started doing sports at sixteen or eighteen, when a person can already consciously choose their path, and not at nine or ten, when we see nothing around us except sports—an interest so artfully stoked. It seems to us that this is some kind of special world. We don’t yet know how narrow this three-dimensional space is—gym, home, training camps.”
Even in paralysis, the discipline lingered. “In the first years after the injury, when I was just lying there, it felt wild to me that nothing was required of me. I so needed this feeling of at least some kind of overcoming that I started to starve myself, just like that. To torment myself. A habit…”
And yet, Mukhina refused to frame herself as a martyr or her coaches as villains. Instead, she blamed a pervasive lack of agency and silence. “There are such notions as the honor of the club, the honor of the team, the honor of the national team, the honor of the flag. They are words behind which you can’t see the person. I don’t condemn anyone and don’t blame anyone for what happened to me. Not Klimenko, and even less the then national-team coach, Shaniyazov. I feel sorry for Klimenko—he’s a victim of the system. I simply don’t respect Shaniyazov. And the others? I was injured because everyone around me maintained neutrality, kept silent. They saw that I wasn’t ready to perform this element. But they were silent. No one stopped the person who, forgetting everything, rushed forward—come on! Come on! Come on!”
What follows is a translation of “Grown-up Games,” which ran in Ogonyok in July of 1988 — eight years after her accident.
Note: I have placed the quotes from Mukhina in italics, even though they aren’t highlighted in the original. It’s easy to read this piece and confuse Mukhina’s first-person statements with the author’s.
Note #2: This is the third post in a four-part series. I’d recommend first reading
How did one of the top U.S. judges perceive her profession in 1972?
Before the Munich Olympics, several newspapers printed profiles of Jackie Fie, who would later go on to become the president of the Women’s Technical Committee. Fie didn’t hold back in her statements. She confessed that judges had to show some favoritism towards their gymnasts “on the battlefield.”
“If you’re not going to go in there and fight for your kids, there’s something wrong with you,” she says. “I don’t think anyone is going to outright cheat, but you have to be lenient in judging your own team.
“If there’s a question in your mind whether one of your girls is worth 9.2 or 9.3, you’re going to give the 9.3—because you know that every other country is going to do the same for its girls.”
That’s just a little teaser of what you can find below…
Jackie Fie, via the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame
For over three decades Czechoslovakia was a powerhouse in the world of women’s artistic gymnastics. From 1936 until 1968, Czechoslovak women’s artistic gymnasts always won at least one medal at the Olympics, and, except for 1950, from 1934 to 1970, they won at least one medal at the World Championships. (Czechoslovakia did not attend the 1950 World Championships.)
In 1972, that streak ended. No Czechoslovak gymnast won a medal in Munich, which led to much soul-searching.
Two years later, at the 1974 World Championships, the winds of fortune changed, and Czechoslovakia was on the podium once again. Božena Perdykulová, a newcomer to the international stage, came to Varna with an impressive Tsukahara and won a bronze medal.
Because Perdykulová is relatively unknown to English-speaking gymnastics fans, I translated two articles about her, as well as an article about the place where she trained.
Before Simone Biles had a kidney stone at the 2018 World Championships, there was Miloslav Netušil of Czechoslovakia. But unlike Biles, who went on to win six medals in Doha, Netušil had to seek medical treatment in the middle of the 1972 Olympic Games. He posted a 54.50 during compulsories and had to withdraw before the second day of the men’s competition (optionals). As a result, the Czechoslovak team was forced to finish the team competition with only five team members.
Below, you can find a short profile of Netušil, who was a three-time Olympian (1968, 1972, and 1976). He died earlier this year.
In 1970, Stanislav Tokarev published an article titled “Gymnastics without Natasha?…” in the magazine Yunost. In it, he announced Natalia (Natasha) Kuchinskaya’s retirement from the sport and observed that the careers of gymnastics stars were much shorter. In addition, he praised the next generation of gymnasts, including Nina Dronova, whom he nicknamed “The Mozart of Gymnastics.”
Four years later, Tokarev wrote a follow-up article in which he opines on several burning questions: Why didn’t Nina Dronova live up to her potential? How do you become Olga Korbut? Why can’t Olga Korbut beat Ludmila Tourischeva in the all-around? What is it like for the Soviet Union to have such deep wells of talent?
Below, you’ll find a translation of the article “Without Natasha, but with Lyuda and Olya.” It was published in the September 1974 issue of Yunost — right before the 1974 World Championships in Varna.
Ludmila Tourischeva and Olga Korbut at a competition between Canada, West Germany, and the Soviet Union in 1972
The Latvian newspaper Sports did interviews with Natalia Kuchinskaya and Klaus Köste at the 1974 edition of the Riga International. At the time, Kuchinskaya, one of the stars of the 1966 World Championships and 1968 Olympic Games, was working in Ukraine as a choreographer. Klaus Köste, the 1972 Olympic champion on vault, had retired from the sport and then came back.
Below, you can find translations of their interviews. You can find a report on the 1974 competition in Riga here.
In 1972, Zdena Dorňáková won the all-around at the Czechoslovak National Championships when she was only 14. She finished 27th in the all-around at the Munich Olympics, suffered an injury right before the 1973 European Championships, and finished 19th in the all-around at the 1974 World Championships in Varna.
Because she won the national title at such a young age, she was a source of fascination in the Czechoslovak media in the early 1970s, and she was portrayed as the gymnast who might rehabilitate Czechoslovak gymnastics. Below, you’ll find a 1973 profile of her, as well as a 1974 interview.
A topic of interest: The tension between the capital and the peripheral gyms. This was not a uniquely Czechoslovak problem. For instance, it was a challenge for Swiss gymnasts, as well.