Maria Filatova: Russian Sparrow Made in the USSR

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 were wooed by the charm and antics of showgirl Filatova.  Her slinky, graceful, yet humorous rendition of a schoolgirl femme fatale almost stole the show during podium training.  Her gritty and alluring performances there persuaded the Soviet national coaches to prefer her to Lidia Gorbik during the team competition, and Filatova’s Olympic career had begun.

Remember, in 1976 gymnasts performed to the accompaniment of a single musical instrument – usually a piano.  Maria could not rely on volume or monobeat to give emphasis and expression to her floor routine – it had to come from her movements.  The following video has, sadly, been overdubbed with instrumental music – but you only have to watch Filatova.  Mute the sound, and you can still appreciate the musicality that was a feature of all her performances.





Did you see that? As well as performing a routine that may comfortably have been seen in Paris’s Folies Bergeres, Maria Filatova, barely 15 years old, completed a double tuck somersault. She danced her way out of a twinkling double twisting somersault. Hardly the work of a cheeky schoolgirl. Filatova – a Master of Sport – was at the very top of her chosen profession at the age of 15, performing acrobatic skills of unprecedented difficulty. And not just on floor. Throughout her career, Filatova was amongst the first on the Soviet team to introduce new, super difficult elements to her work, at a time when the sport was taking consistent strides forward in technique and power.

Maria Filatova’s innovations

Vault Tsukuhara with full twist (1976 USSR Nationals EF)
Uneven Bars From giant circle, cross hands half turn into straddle
forward somersault to hang on high bar
Beam Flic-flac layout/two layouts in a row
Beam dismount Flic-flac x 2 (2 feet) – double twist/double back/
double pike
Floor Round off-flic flac – double back/double pike/full
in back out (the first on the Soviet team)

Source : Maria Filatova Kourbatova

Speak to Maria today, and she will tell you that finding her way onto the Soviet team was her greatest achievement. Look at the names of the gymnasts with whom she competed throughout her career – names like Tourischeva, Kim, Korbut, Davydova. Filatova, a young gymnast from a distant part of Russia, broke the mould when she joined the Soviet team, combining the lyrical tradition of the past with the developing acrobatic trend of the future. She came not from one of the established powerhouses of Soviet gymnastics, but from Siberia, an area with a developing reputation for excellence. Alongside her coach, Innokenty Mametyev, whom she still remembers fondly today and with whom she lived as family from the age of 11, she presented a style of gymnastics that was to set a new standard in World gymnastics.

Maria Filatova did not stand still after her meteoric rise to fame at the 1976 Olympics. During the years that followed she won no fewer than ten gold medals in all around competitions. In 1977 she became Soviet national champion, and in 1978 won the World Cup. Four times she won a gold medal as part of the winning Soviet team at World Championships or the Olympics. Her beam work was consistently amongst the best in the world, and still shines for its balance and smoothness. But it was on floor that Filatova shone brightest. Her transformation from the baby diva of 1976 to the graceful artiste of 1980 was marked by a limpid, emotive performance that still stops me in my tracks each time I see it. It must be one of the most memorable, moving routines ever.



Many people believe that Maria merited all around gold at her final competition, the 1981 World Championships. Having ‘set the table’ for the Soviet team, her qualification scores did not give her the same bonus as her rivals. I prefer, though, to think of Filatova the way she is described in the Russian Gymnastics Hall of Fame : ‘the strongest gymnast of the 1970s’.

Despite all her medals and achievements, the fondest memory Maria Filatova has of her career in gymnastics are the many friends she made across the world, and I am sure that there are even more than Maria might imagine. As part of the Soviet display team that visited so many different places around the world, she was a fantastic ambassador for her country. Maria was one of the first gymnasts I ever saw perform live (at the age of 16, in 1976 at Wembley), and one of the first Russians of my age I ever knew anything about. To many of us in the West, Russians were unblinking, silent old men with large, caterpillar-like eyebrows and black, shapeless great coats. Maria, with her mischievous smiling face and cheeky gestures, was more like one of us. These friendship displays opened my eyes to aspects of Russian culture and to the possibility of friendship with people from a country who might otherwise have remained foreign to me.

There is one other thing I remember in particular about Maria and, rather unusually, it is not directly about her gymnastics. Some time after the 1980 Olympics, Maria wrote (in Russian):

‘If there is divinity in this world, it is work, and the beauty of work.’

This seems quite mysterious to me, something I can barely understand. Yet it says something about Maria, her gymnastics, and the special feeling that she brings to her sport. A special feeling that seems to me to be Russian, through and through.

If Maria is not Russian, they will have to invent a special nationality for her.

Maria Filatova – bibliography

Anonymous (1977) ‘Storming the Heights’ 6 April 1977 English translation available at http://www.gymn-forum.net/Articles/SS_77RigaM.html accessed 12.2.2012

Golubev, V (1978) ‘Champion in Pigtails’ Soviet Life April 1978. English translation available at http://www.gymn-forum.net/Articles/SL-Filato.html accessed 12.2.2012

Isbister, J (online) Maria Filatova available at http://www.gymn.ca/gymnasticgreats/wag/filatova.htm accessed 12.2.2012

Moscow News (1976) ‘A Gymnastics Gala in Moscow’ Moscow News, No 15, 1976. English translation available at http://www.gymn-forum.net/Articles/MN-Comp76.html accessed 12.2.2012

Moscow News (1977) ‘Grand Gymnastics Review’ Moscow News, No 15, 1977.
English translation available at http://www.gymn-forum.net/Articles/MN-Comp77.html accessed 12.2.2012

Sovietsky Sport (1979) ‘The Passion of Maria Filatova’ Sovietsky Sport, 6 April 1979. English translation available at http://www.gymn-forum.net/Articles/SS-Riga79W.html accessed 12.2.2012

‘You in gymnastics’(1978) Soviet TV documentary on the Soviet team in training featuring Filatova, Zakharova, Yurchenko, Mukhina, Shaposhnikova and many other stars from the late 1970s. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

Zaglada, Vladimir (2012) Interview with Maria Filatova. Personal correspondence between the authors, 12.2.2012

With thanks to Debbie Poe and her Gymn Forum resource and to Levlava and the Youtube gymnastics community.

Article written by Elizabeth Booth and Vladimir Zaglada. There is a Russian language version of this article, along with an appreciation and commentary by Vladimir, at I-G.tv.