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Maria Filatova: Russian Sparrow Made in the USSR

Maria Filatova – the first ever picture taken of her doing gymnastics! By kind permission of Maria Filatova Kourbatova My first memory of Maria Filatova is a little girl with huge, white ribbons in her hair, so tiny she seemed to have to stand on tiptoe to be able to see over the balance beam.  At 4’ 6” tall, she was the smallest competitor at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, yet she was already part of the Soviet senior team, competing alongside such established stars as Ludmilla Tourischeva, Nelli Kim, Elvira Saadi and Olga Korbut.  The ‘Siberian Sparrow’, trained in Leninsk-Kuznetsk by Innokenty Mametyev since a very early age, celebrated her 15 th birthday on the 19 th July 1976, the day of the team final.  That night, she slept with her first – not her last - Olympic gold medal beneath her pillow. For all her cuteness, Maria Filatova was a fearsome gymnast and competitor.  If the crowd were awed by the pyrotechnics of Romanian technician Nadia Comaneci, they we...

‘My daughter likes gymnastics. For us, this is the big success’. Aliya Mustafina talks to Match TV

Via VK.com.  Google translate A big interview with Aliya Mustafina was published on MATCH!. We provide a small excerpt below, and the full version is available on the website at the link below  ❓ Aliya, you are now the head coach of the junior artistic gymnastics team. What does your typical day look like? 💜 My current life is similar to what it was when I was competing. In the morning, I have breakfast and go to work by 9:00, we train for four hours, have lunch, rest and train for another three hours. During the training camp, the athletes live at the base. They live and train on the same territory. ❓ Do you manage the gymnasts' personal trainers or do you evenly distribute the responsibilities? 💜 We work in contact with the personal trainers, I listen to their opinions. For example, if the trainer believes that their athlete needs to be given a little rest or do fewer repetitions of a particular exercise, we do so. ❓ Describe the current generation of children. Do they nee...

Viktoria Komova - Happy Birthday!

Viktoria Komova, born 30th January 1995, celebrates her birthday today.  Happy Birthday, Viktoria! Have a lovely day. Time to revisit a picture gallery posted last year ... and to hope for a good year for Viktoria and her fans. I was doing something far more important, researching an article, when these pictures of Viktoria Komova  caught my eye. They are far from the standard gymnastics pictures of gymnasts celebrating, commiserating, or caught in the midst of their most graceful pose.  Not the best, most aesthetic images to view.  When looking at pictures of gymnasts I am often conscious of selecting the ones taken from the most flattering angle, avoiding the shot with the bent legs, the out of control arms. I took a different viewpoint here, choosing Komova at the most stressed, the least stagey point of her work.  These pictures capture Komova in flight, in the height of motion and effort.  There is no contrivance to them, no trained pose or pause...

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