Rewriting Russian Gymnastics

For many years, Collet's socialist bookshop on Tottenham Court Road, London was somewhere I went to find little treasures of Soviet gymnastics.  It was a subject that was sparsely, often very cynically treated by the British press, and it is hard to explain how ridiculously valuable every last jewel of information seemed.  I read more than I could buy, but remember the thrill of finding my first copies of Sport in the USSR .  And there were, occasionally, books and booklets, too.  I stumbled across this little biography of Nikolai Andrianov when sorting through some books and papers recently.  I love the look of it, the use of black and white photography, the presentation of Andrianov as a man of the people, the arty farty shots of the chalked up hands, the Olympic champion exhausted in a pile of foam.  It was 95p, not much then or now, but worth a whole lot more to me, always.  I have a new camera, ready for my trip to Moscow later this spring, an...