Post Putin Gymnastics

That’s a bit premature, I hear you say!!

Gymnastics evolves by practice, informing ideas that develop into more practice.  Leadership of the sport takes place in competitions large and small, international and domestic.  This is then formalised by the various technical committees who write up the new Codes of Point, which in turn encourage the shape of gymnastics.  

What you see in competitions is the outcome of work by many different gymnasts and coaches around the world, interfered with by the process of taste distinctions held by a few people sitting around a table in Lausanne, or wherever the meetings are taking place.  

If one component of that process changes, then the ‘taste distinction’ stage of the process also changes.  When the American women were dominating the sport, tastes shifted in favour of powerful tumbling and precise execution. Judges can only mark what is on the table, and so this kind of shift develops into a sort of ‘echo chamber’, emphasising and overemphasising the growth of a particular type of gymnastics.  

It takes quite an amount of energy to shift the sound and power of that echo.  We’ve seen that beginning to take place in the contributions of the Dutch team to performance quality in the floor and beam exercises.  The Olympic team champions. Russia, took this a step forward in Tokyo with their powerful tumbling combined with excellent dance - and, most importantly, they won - which further empowers any style influence.  

The men’s sport was gripped by a tussle between the elegant, technically powerful Japanese and the crazy pyrotechnics of the Russians.  At that time, the Russians were dominant.  They created such a noise it made it difficult to judge what other gymnasts were doing.  They blacked out the work of all but the most dominant gymnasts.

This seems to me to have been the eternal dynamics of gymnastics since the day I started to observe it, over 50 years ago.  Discussions of taste have perhaps become more public and arguably more democratic with the advent of social media, but there have always been swings and counter swings in the identity of the sport, initiated in shifts of power played out in competition and the boardroom of the FIG.  

Gymnastics has become more tangible and less whimsical in those fifty years.  Public debate of taste included poetry in the Soviet Union, all those years ago, when we considered whether the banning of the back somersault on beam would ‘forbid [Olga] to fly’.  The gymnasts were observed as a product of their training environment and coaching;  in women’s gymnastics we saw the Svengali-like operations of Shtukman, Knysh, Ratstorotsky and Karolyi bend and shape gymnastics in multiple directions, technical and artistic.  We saw the interplay of power dynamics as the less vocal, more integral work of the mostly female choreographers had its silent but elemental influence on the structure of routines and the manner of their performance.  

In women’s gymnastics, it is quite probably this, the quiet work of the choreographers, that had the greatest public impact on the appearance of gymnastics.  The work of Sokolova, Kapitanova, Rassina and Ganina are all strong influences on Soviet and Russian gymnastics.  Yet they are all women, and few of them experienced the same incentives to travel and work overseas as their male counterparts.  Their influence on gymnastics is gentler and less easy to articulate; easier to judge than to evaluate.  More vulnerable in a system of codifying and calculating scores.

The wall that is currently being constructed around Russia is a tragedy for culture, sport and international friendship.  Its construction is the consequence of too much power being held in too few hands, and the desperate fight for more and more power by people who don’t care what misery they cause for the rest of us.

Russia is the largest landmass in the world, yet its population is small and rapidly declining.  Most of its wealth is in the hands of a few people.  It’s incredibly difficult to lead a normal life in Russia.  Standards of living are poor.  Virtually the only democratically shared success of Russian life stands in the realms of culture, art and sport, and even that is littered with corruption, cruelty and nepotism.  Putin, and the Russian establishment, began to ruin Russia’s sporting accomplishments a few years ago with the ridiculous, needless and systematic doping of champions at the Sochi Winter Olympics.  This began the process of isolation of Russian athletes that has continued to this day, and finds its current expression in the barring of Russian teams from the Olympic Games, as a result of the ridiculous, needless and tragic war that Russia started with its neighbour, Ukraine.  

Russia is losing countless people because of this war.  Hundreds of thousands have been killed.  Still more have migrated in search of a better home.  The longer this war persists, the fewer reasonable people remain in Russia.  The only people left, apart from the poor and powerless, are the powerful and wealthy, whose only aim in life is to become more powerful and wealthy; they don’t care who or what they destroy in their pointless acquisition of gold.  They don’t care if Russia is reduced to a boggy war field full of trenches and bomb damage; they can go and live in Texas, or Paris, or London.

And the athletes and coaches will suffer, because despite Putin’s love of sport, sport will not be a priority.  Sport cannot thrive without competition.  Competition cannot exist when there is no friendship.  Putin did some great things for sport and for Russian society in general, while it lasted.  But he threw it all away when he opened the Pandora box of greater power and wealth and false glory.  

There will be an impact on international sport, and especially on the ‘artistic’ sports, where the form of the sport is constantly evolving and influenced by the various power dynamics.

In gymnastics, it will take some time for  this to become clear.  The Russian diaspora will hold up the influence of Russian taste distinctions on the sport for a while.  The great champions will show up on the internet and make us happy.  We still love them.

But eventually, gymnastics will lose Russia, and miss Russian power at both political and sporting levels.  When the Soviet Union fell apart, its effect was to dissipate the total influence the USSR had on the sport at all levels.  This influence continued to be shared by the former Soviet countries, mostly Belarus, Ukraine and Russia.  It was Russia who followed the ambition and kept the gymnastics faith to fight for the lead in the sport.  They had just (2021) stepped up to the highest spot on the podium when the Russian leadership decided to implode.  

I pray for Ukraine every day; peace is the only possible outcome for their suffering.  Ukraine wants and deserves peace. 

I also pray for Russia.  Russia fervently needs peace, it needs strong leaders who can offer its population normal lives.  It needs friendship.  But it shrugs its heavy shoulders and turns away.  With Putin, Russia has a war with Ukraine which to many poorly informed and poorly educated Russians is morally ambiguous.  Ordinary Russians feel little responsibility or power to change this.  Without Putin, Russia goes from bad to worse as the Warlords battle for its possession and exploit its resources, including its population.  

I doubt we will get our Russian athletes and their coaches back.  Their absence will be strongly felt.  Without that intangible charisma, gymnastics will become another sport again.