ICON - Svetlana Boguinskaia

 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, and 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 immediately following the 1988 Olympics.  Svetlana thought of retirement; but gymnastics was her life.

1989 saw Svetlana take European and World AA gold medals.

Svetlana never found a replacement for Miromanova, who had been like a mother to her. Coaches who helped her along the way include Liudmilla Popcovich, Alexander Alexandrov, (Svetlana named her son Brandon Alexander after him), Anatoly Kozeev, Oleg Ostapenko, and Yuri Kozyrev. Much later, in the second phase of her career in the mid 1990s, she trained again with Alexandrov, and briefly with Bela Karolyi.   

1990 - five gold medals at the Europeans in Athens, and a gold on floor at the World Cup in Brussels with a simply sublime presentation that few television commentators could find the words to describe (to speak over this would be to defile it).  

In the 1991 Worlds she took the silver AA and then ruled the BB.

By 1992, younger gymnasts were moving up the Soviet ladder, younger girls with greater difficulty in their routines.  But Boguinskaia still ruled for her grace and the difficulty of her dance.  To this day, no one can match her.

As the 1992 Olympics drew to a close, so did the era of great Soviet champions. As the Soviet Union dismantled, Svetlana's team had competed together in Barcelona as the Commonwealth of Independent States.  After the Games, individual gymnasts followed their own paths.  

Svetlana caught the imagination of musicians B52s, and appeared in a video of their song, Revolution Earth, along with fellow Belarussian and USSR team mate, Vitaly Scherbo.  The quiet mystery of the Soviet gymnasts became part of the West's extrovert commercialism.

Boguinskaia's era wasn't quite over as she prepared for the 1996 Olympics and won more medals on the way.  But the pattern of her sporting life reflected that of her countries, Belarus and the Soviet Union.  She was and remains a cultural icon.

1987/8