Rewriting Russian Gymnastics

I’ve reached a time in my life when it’s more important to watch the birds and listen to my nephews and nieces laughing than it is to write about Russian gymnastics.  I  have a couple of ‘wrap ups’ in the pipeline but that’s all, folks. The Olympics just aren’t the Olympics without the Russians, at least for me.  I wish Russia would put their energy into great sport instead of military endeavours.  I’m no fan of the IOC and the Russian gymnasts did a lot of good for peace and friendship over about 70 years.  But Russia’s leaders are letting their people down.   I’ll continue to walk alongside Angelina Melnikova and will post occasional updates of her work and life on my RRG Facebook page.  She is remarkable.   I hope that Russia’s young gymnasts can find a way to continue what is essentially their livelihood, if necessary by moving overseas.  It would be great if some of them could study abroad. I’m unfollowing Nagorny.  He walked with a...

I’m supposed to be taking some time for my mental health, not writing blog posts about gymnastics.   It’s not only my mental health, but that of the whole gymnastics and sporting community.  You, my readers, know that the Court for the Arbitration of Sport has reassigned the bronze medal in the FX event at the Olympics.  We finally have the right finishing order, but the FIG is at huge fault here.  The appeals system went wrong in both its substance and its process, and before that the judges had failed, giving us inaccurate marks and unfair finishing orders.   The gymnasts, Jordan Chiles and Ana Barbosu, are suffering and instead of unbounded joy and pride they feel humiliation and confusion and embarrassment.  That the judges couldn’t get the medals in the right order first time (and that there’s still one out there, Sabrina Voinea, whose question is left unresolved) is the biggest pair of oversized pants since the last time the FIG messed up.   That...

  Almost ten years ago RRG covered a story about a story of doping of Soviet gymnasts in 1968.     For some reason, that story is receiving a lot of hits on my site at present, and I don’t know why.  So a word of caution. The RRG story is a story within a story - a story of how stories can become distorted in the telling.  It centres on an article that had appeared in The Observer in November 2015.  The article had been talking about sports doping in general, and used pregnancy doping as an example, presenting allegations as truth. Pregnancy doping would be a vile abuse of a woman’s trust, more abuse than doping, and subject to the same rules of reporting as apply to abuse everywhere.    You don’t name victims of abuse unless they have spoken out themselves, and you shouldn’t pursue or doorstep an alleged victim of abuse for journalistic purposes.   The whole social context is difficult - contraception was poor quality in 1960s Soviet Union, ...

The FIG managed to do it again and set us all off talking about the scoring and how dreadful it was, rather than the performances and how brilliant they were. I personally loved that Alice d’Amato won beam with the best executed routine.    I think that the sport undervalues good execution in general, and this was a moment when the judges got it right. It’s a pity that there weren’t fewer falls overall in this final, but it’s the nature of the beam that people fall from it, and the major good thing today was that the champion was the one who stayed on the beam.   I’m an oldie.    I used to love the hushed silence in the audience that fell as the best gymnasts were performing.    The first time I experienced this in person was in the Ahoy Stadium in Rotterdam, at the 1987 Worlds, when Silivas stepped up to the uneven bars.    It reminded me of Korbut in Munich, and Comaneci in Montreal.    It didn’t happen all that often, but it...

 BOGUINSKAIA (USSR-BLR) Born 1973 in Minsk, Belarus At age 6, after a period of time in ice skating, began gymnastics with coach Liubov Miromanova, occasionally training at the USSR national training centre in Moscow, Lake Krugloye.  Her ambition was boundless.  She was determined to train a triple dismount off uneven bars.  She wanted to be the first to compete the double twisting Tsukuhara (Boguinskaia’s Tsukuhara).   Soviet national coach of the junior team, Anatoly Kozeev, supported Miromanova and Boguinskaia, and her first major international assignments followed at the age of 12. The International Junior Cup in Japan, 1985, was one of her first overseas competitions, a nd in 1986 she became Junior European Champion. By 1987 she was winning medals at the World Championships. And by 1988 was hanging Olympic gold in her medal cabinet. Great sadness overcame Svetlana and her loved ones when her coach, Liubov Miromanova, committed suicide in the days immed...