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Olga Mostepanova - four perfect tens in one competition

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Olga Mostepanova in training.  Courtesy of RIA Novosti

The joy of that video of the 1976 Olympics sent me into an Olympic reverie, a recollection of perfect tens of the past. 

There is no greater unsung hero than 1983 and 1985 World Champion Olga Mostepanova, who competed at the 1984 Alternative Olympics in Olomouc, but was denied the chance of appearing at the Olympics thanks to larger, world political events that saw the Soviet Union boycott the Los Angeles Games. 

I first saw Olga compete at Wembley in 1981 at the annual Champions All competition.  She was a tiny little thing, wearing a white leotard and with big white ribbons in her hair.  I remember how coach Vladimir Aksenov paid attention to her between each apparatus, holding her hand and leading her through the competition.  But for all her baby looks, Olga was an impressive gymnast, especially on beam where her lines, soft and sharp at the same time, melded with an innate sense of rhythm to create gymnastics of great beauty.

Olga is the only gymnast ever to score ten on all four pieces of apparatus.  She achieved this at Olomouc, the alternative Olympic Games set up for the Eastern bloc countries in 1984.  In Los Angeles, Mary Lou Retton became the first all-American gymnastics star, all air-punching, powerful and grinning white teeth.  In Olomouc Mostepanova became a legend of the purest artistic form seen in world gymnastics - ever.  Those four ten scoring routines remain the Holy Grail of gymnastics, much sought after, but rarely seen in their entirety. 

I had to remind myself that it's 28 years since Olga achieved this amazing feat, and went running again to the wonderful RIA Novosti media gallery where I picked up some matchlessly gorgeous pictures.  You can see the entire selection I have made at RRG's Facebook page.  Savour too the all too brief videos.  Olga's contribution to the sport is becoming a disappearing legacy of the aesthetic, the blurry lines of the video recording reflecting the distance of time and space between her outstanding performances and the disappointingly tangible gymnastics of today.


Olga Mostepanova's perfect beam compulsory from the 1985 World Championships





An all too short fragment of Olga's floor routine from the 1984 Alternative Olympic Games.
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