Four months before the Olympic Games, East Germany held its national championships. As expected, Karin Janz and Klaus Köste won the all-around titles. Behind them, you could see the Olympic team starting to take shape.
Let’s take a look at the results and reports on the 1972 East German Championships…
Edvard Mikaelian was part of the Soviet teams that finished second at the 1972 Olympics and 1974 World Championships. In the lead-up to the Munich Olympics, he finished sixth at the USSR Championships and fourth at the USSR Cup. At the Olympics, he tied for 20th in the all-around.
The following interview, printed in the Czechoslovak weekly Stadión, fleshes out the character of one of the lesser-known members of the Soviet men’s team. It portrays him as a trendy, fashionable citizen of the world, who loved both ballet and American rock and roll, including the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, and, of all things, the musical Jesus Christ Superstar.
Note: This profile includes an anecdote that would no longer be socially acceptable to print today.
The Riga International was one of the big competitions early in the 1972 competitive season. It allowed gymnasts to try out the compulsory routines in an international setting and test new elements.
On the women’s side, Korbut swept all five gold medals while performing many of the skills that would captivate the world in Munich. (Unfortunately, her struggles on bars continued.) Plus, Bogdanova (URS) performed one of the first double fulls off beam, while Gehrke (GDR) performed one of the first Tsukahara vaults in women’s artistic gymnastics.
On the men’s side, Tsukahara unveiled a new dismount off high bar: a full-twisting double back. And Zoltán Magyar performed his famous travel on pommel horse.
Here’s what else happened at the 1972 Riga International…
The USSR Championships were the first major domestic challenge for the Soviet gymnasts on the road to Munich, and they were full of surprises.
Nikolai Andrianov, who was third at the 1971 European Championships, won the all-around, defeating both Voronin and Klimenko. But on the second day of competition, which didn’t count toward his all-around total, he found himself sitting on the parallel bars.
And Ludmilla Tourischeva finally won the all-around title at the USSR Championships. Yes, she had won both the European and World all-around titles before she won the USSR Championships. (She had won the USSR Cup in 1969 and 1971.) She, too, had a major error during the competition.
Afterward, the Soviet media produced video profiles of both champions. You can find the videos, transcripts, and translations below.
At the 1971 European Championships, Nikolai Andrianov finished third behind Viktor Klimenko (first) and Mikhail Voronin (second). One year later, the momentum had changed. Not only did Andrianov beat Klimenko and Voronin; he dominated the competition, winning by 1.70 points. (To be fair, Klimenko was still recovering from an Achilles tear that happened on floor during warm-ups at the European Championships.)
That said, there were still plenty of mistakes that needed to be fixed before the Munich Olympics, and Andrianov was not immune to the falling contagion that spread throughout the gym in Kyiv. As one newspaper put it, “Kolya Andrianov was sitting on parallel bars, as if on a fence, and smiling in a childish way, as if he was not a master of international class.”
So, here’s the coverage of the men’s competition at the 1972 USSR Championships.
Note: You can read a preview of the competition here.
In the lead-up to the 1972 Olympics, the first big test for Soviet gymnasts was the USSR Championships, held in Kyiv at the end of March and the beginning of April.
Tourischeva and Lazakovich were the clear favorites on the women’s side, but people were eager to see if gymnasts from the 1968 Olympics like Karaseva and Voronina could hang on. Dronova, another aspirant for the Olympic Team, was still recovering from an injury.
There were three clear frontrunners on the men’s side: Klimenko, Voronin, and Andrianov.
Here’s a short preview of the competition.
Reminder: The USSR Championships and the USSR Cup were two separate competitions. Both competitions were held in the lead-up to the 1972 Olympics.
Note: Korbut is not mentioned in the article. In her autobiography My Story, Korbut posits that Stanislav Tokarev, the author of this article, did not appreciate her gymnastics prior to the Munich Olympics.
At the 1972 Olympics, the men’s compulsories followed the standard format: set routines that each gymnast had to perform exactly as the text stated. (Reminder: In 1969, the FIG decided to make compulsories valid for four years rather than having separate compulsories for the World Championships and Olympic Games.)
The women’s compulsories, on the other hand, took a different path: there were specific skills and a specific order in which those skills had to be performed, but each national team was responsible for designing its own routines.
Let’s take a look at the compulsory routines.
A qualification system was put in place for the Munich Olympic Games. Countries had to achieve specific scores during a set period in order to participate in the Olympic Games.
Here were the rules guiding the process.
At the 1961 University Games (also called the Universiade) in Sofia, Bulgaria, gymnastics was added to the program for the first time. It wasn’t a large competition — only 18 women and 28 men participated in the individual all-around competition.
But there were some big names, including 1960 Olympic gold medalists Mitsukuri Takahashi and Tamara Lyukhina, 1960 silver medalist Yuri Titov, as well as 1960 bronze medalists Sonia Iovan, Emilia Liță, and Elena Leușteanu. (There were other World and Olympic medalists at the competition.)
The events were split between two days: August 27 and August 28. The women competed on beam and floor on the first day and on bars and vault on the second. The men competed on floor, pommel horse, and rings on the first day and on vault, parallel bars, and high bar on the second day.
What follows are the complete results from the competition.
In 1958, before the World Championships in Moscow, the Code of Points for men’s gymnastics was updated again. By and large, this version of the Code combined the 1949 Code of Points and the 1954 supplement in one single document.
That said, there were a few changes in the 1958 Code of Points. Below, you’ll find a summary of the major changes, as well as the original French text, as printed in the magazine Le Gymnaste, May 1958. Thanks to the Bibliothèque nationale de France for the documents.
