In 1967, Lyubov Burda stunned Soviet audiences with a dazzling new release move on the uneven bars — the “Burda twirl.” From that moment, her career unfurled with remarkable speed: Olympic team gold in 1968, World Championships medals, a second Olympic title in Munich, and memorable duels with Ludmilla Tourischeva for national supremacy. Yet Burda was never only a prodigy of results and medals; she carried with her the lessons of her coach, Yuri Shtukman, whose patience and humanity shaped her approach both as a gymnast and later as a mentor. By the late 1980s, she was no longer the schoolgirl from Voronezh dazzling crowds, but a coach and mother in Vladimir, navigating the challenges of raising children and guiding the next generation in a sport that had become ever more demanding.

In this personal essay, published in 1987 as part of the Lessons of Life series, Burda-Andrianova reflects on the joys and burdens of coaching girls at a time when Soviet gymnastics was marked by increasing technical difficulty, shrinking age limits, and systemic pressures on both athletes and coaches. Her writing is frank, even raw: she describes the challenging home lives of her gymnasts, overburdened trainers, and a system that rewarded machine-like difficulty over artistry and emotion. Yet through it all runs her abiding love for gymnastics and for her pupils — “my girls,” as she calls them — whose resilience and trust gave her both purpose and hope. What emerges is less a nostalgic look back at a glittering career than a plea for a more humane, more beautiful vision of the sport, one in which gymnastics is not just a test of skill but a formative force in shaping lives.
