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…
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.
The USSR Championships were early in the 1972 competitive season, and as one would expect, Soviet gymnasts were not in top form. Tourischeva and Lazakovich had problems with their compulsory beam routines. Olga Korbut’s problems on bars continued; she hit her feet on a glide swing during the compulsory bar routine.
Nevertheless, despite the problems, Polina Astakhova, who would be on the floor with the Soviet gymnasts in Munich, had “a quite positive general impression.”
Below, you can find the results, as well as Sovetsky Sport’s coverage of the women’s competition at the 1972 USSR Championships.
An interesting tidbit: Tourischeva performed two different floor routines during the USSR Championships. One routine was to “Glory” by Glinka. The other was to a song from the 1944 German movie The Woman of My Dreams. She would use the latter in Munich.
Another tidbit: Elvira Saadi was called “The Panther” by the French, and her arm choreography was her signature as was her ability to feel the “subtleties of the tragic jester’s soul” while performing to Rachmaninoff’s “Polichinelle.”
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.
In October of 1971, just days after the European Championships, the Soviet Union and the East German gymnasts faced off. The Soviet Union won, and Olga Korbut won the all-around.
A few months later, in March of 1972, the two teams held another dual meet. This time, the East German team won, and Karin Janz won the all-around.
Ludmilla Tourischeva was absent, and reportedly, Olga Korbut had to withdraw due to injury. Nevertheless, the East German press was excited about this victory during an Olympic year, especially the team’s progress on floor exercise.
Let’s take a look at what happened…
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.
From 1956 until 1962, Larisa Latynina dominated the all-around at the major international gymnastics competitions. Then, it was Věra Čáslavská’s turn, and she won the major all-around titles from 1964 until 1968.
Once Čáslavská retired from the sport, there was a power vacuum. The title of the world’s best female gymnast was up for grabs. Who would win the all-around title in 1970? Would it be Karin Janz, who won the all-around at the European Championships in 1969?
The gymnastics world had its reservations about Karin Janz. Sure, she had tremendous difficulty, but she lacked “femininity and softness.” Words like “machine” and “mechanical” were often used to describe her gymnastics.
The following profile of Janz, printed in the Czechoslovak magazine Stadión before the 1970 World Championships, summarizes many conflicted sentiments about the East German teenager.