Rewriting Russian Gymnastics

Alexander Alexandrov, courtesy of Sports Express Alexander Alexandrov is not the first coach to leave Russia, and will not be the last.  Not too long ago, it was confirmed that over 320 coaches had already left the country to work overseas. There has been a subtle changing of the guard in Russian gymnastics coaching as a new generation of coaches has stepped up to replace the former Svengalis who shaped the sport during the 70s, 80s and much of the 90s. Take a look at the list of coaches on the RGF website.  Very few of the 'old guard' Soviet Russian coaches survive.  Chief coach Andrei Rodionenko is one of remaining few, but his personal style has always been cool, managerial, and rather distant, somewhat atypical of his peers.  The new generation of coaches are generally set in his image.  We are saying a long goodbye to the charismatic paternalism, the sartorial individualism of the Soviet personal coaches.  In its place we have the cool profe...

Elena Vaitsekhovskaya is one of Russia's leading sports journalists, herself a former Olympian.  You will have read Lupita's translation of at least one piece of her writing here - the article entitled ' Undesirable Alexandrov ' which was so insightful on the staffing changes that so upset the Russian camp last autumn. Just this afternoon I found her website , which though in the Russian language is a treasure trove of authoritative interviews with and articles about leading coaching figures such as Alexander Alexandrov, Andrei Rodionenko, Leonid Arkayev and many of the top gymnasts of the past twenty years, including Dmitri Bilozerchev, Aliya Mustafina, Nikolai Kryukov, Alexei Voropaev and Maxim Devyatovski.  It's well worth a few Sunday afternoons navigating the complexities of Google translate.  The Russian language gymnastics listing is here , and there is a resource of article translations, though not much gymnastics, here . One article I found particul...