Rewriting Russian Gymnastics

Once upon a time sportsmen were heros and role models, a shining moral example for all of society as to the values of a strong work ethic and a healthy body. USSR is a might sports power!  B. Reshetnikov, 1962  Picture courtesy of A Soviet Poster a Day I love these Soviet era posters and the way they capture the spirit of the time, something special about the purity of the collective sporting effort.  Of course today, sport is about different things.  The political and behavioural symbolic value of sport has been replaced by sport as a commodity.  Sports stars exist as brand heroes in our shopping centres and glossy magazines, the sometimes lurid details of their everyday lives trumpeted on the pages of such magazines as Hello! and the gossip pages of the internet. Compare photographs of Olympians Svetlana Khorkina (1996, 2000 and 2004) and Ludmilla Tourischeva (1972, 1976): Khorkina is in all her glamour shot, sexually charged splendour; Svetlana...

I was looking through my bookcases last night and thinking that I must, pretty soon, get round to re-organising my library as my work on this blog progresses. Over the past couple of days some new references have come to light, not least an article in the Science of Gymnastics journal by Abie Grossfeld that chronicles the history of American gymnastics. This is timely, especially in view of my recent resurrection of such Soviet classics as Brodsky’s (1987) Soviet Sport: The Success and Ramsey and Khromov’s (1990) Ten Soviet Sports Stars. Grossfeld’s work is surely not the only one on the subject of American gymnastics, but I took the opportunity to skim read them and to compare the styles and content of what are arguably, in addition to historic data, works of self-publicity, self-disclosure and even propaganda. What struck me first of all were the similarities between Grossfeld’s and Grodsky’s work. Statistical evidence of the various sporting bodies, numbers of participants and...