Rewriting Russian Gymnastics

There is a very special article on the RGF website at present, all about the making of the 20 minute documentary 'Olympic Target'.  The film is about 1976 and 1980 Olympian Maria Filatova, who of course featured on the pages of this blog earlier this week.  It's a fascinating piece that tells many different stories about film making in the Soviet Union, about training conditions for the national team at that time, and about the personalities involved in producing one of those iconic black and white films.  I will summarise the best bits below. The film 'Olympic Target' was made in 1978 by film maker Vladimir Lapin, out of the Western Siberia newsreel studios in Novosibirsk.  In 1987, this black and white film won a special award, given by the International Olympic Committee, at the Tunisia International Sports Film Festival.  It had also won awards in 1979 in Film Festivals in Italy, Budapest and Kiev.  The 1987 award went almost unnoticed by the Soviet...

Maria posted this picture of Mischa the bear, mascot of the 1980 Olympics All the best gymnasts are called Maria ... :-) And today, it's Maria Filatova's special day - Happy Birthday, Maria!! Maria won gold medals at both the 1976 Montreal and 1980 Moscow Olympics. She was 1978 World Cup all around champion, and four times won gold medals as part of the Soviet team at Worlds and Olympics. In 1981 she won the silver medal all around at the Moscow World Championships, where many people felt she merited the gold. She was a great fan favourite and a great in her own right, competing during a vintage era of classical gymnastics, alongside fellow legends such as Liudmilla Tourischeva, Olga Korbut and Nelli Kim..  You can read more about her here and at her official site, here . Maria is a good Leo woman, positive and sunny, full of encouragement and happy words for those around her. She was always a great team mate, and still is today, as a coach working at her own clu...

Further exploration has uncovered these three Soviet produced films on the gymnastics competitions at the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Men's competition, part 1 There is a running commentary of the exercises featuring Alexander Detiatin, Nikolai Andrianov, Alexander Tkachev, Roland Brueckner, Michael Nikolay, the legendary Zoltan Magyar on the pommels, Danut Grecu, Stojan Delchev (double salto forward with half turn dismount off rings). Men's competition, part 2 Features an early Cuban effort at a handspring double front vault and a slow motion technical analysis of Nikolai Andrianov's Tsukahara vault, Tkachev's winning parallel bars routine including a slow motion section on the piked forward somersault with straddle, Tkachev's 10 scoring high bar routine (beautiful) including slow motion analysis of the Tkachev release element, Kovacs, Delchev, Arroya's one armed work. Dismount elements by Andrianov, Detiatin. Delchev's gold medal winning routine. ...

You will have read about Maria's struggles to obtain the Russian passport she needs to be able to travel home to be with her family and close friends. This surely is a fundamental right for a gymnast who has represented her nation and ethnicity so brilliantly for so many years, both as a gymnast and as a coach. Public support is growing apace. Go to Sovietsky Sport for a round up of their campaign to help Maria, including a video of one of her best performances from the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Lupita has been scouring the internet for videos of this wonderfully innovative and versatile champion and sent me links to two different floor routines from 1977. Maria performs the first one to Spanish jota music, at the 1977 World Cup, held in Oviedo, Spain. There Maria became World Cup Champion, taking two golds in the all around and floor competitions. The second video is of the 1977 European Championships in Prague, infamous for the Karolyi-led Romanian team's walk o...

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...