Gymnastics History

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.

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.

“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!”

Note: In my translation, I’ve preserved the bold typeface from the original publication.

Note #2: This is the final part in a four-part series. I’d urge you to first read part 1 (What the Soviet Union Printed about Mukhina’s Accident), part 2 (What the Rest of the World Printed about Mukhina’s Accident), and part 3 (Elena Mukhina Breaks Her Silence in “Grown-up Games”).

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

• Part 1 (What the Soviet Union Printed about Mukhina’s Accident)
• Part 2 (What the Rest of the World Printed about Mukhina’s Accident).

After reading this interview, you can read a 1989 interview with her, as well. (Elena Mukhina Addresses the Myths in “After Fame, After Tragedy”)