Elena Vaitsekhovskaya - website, and an interview with Elena Mukhina

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 particularly interesting - haunting actually - was this interview with Elena Mukhina.  Elena was the 1978 overall world champion, a beautiful gymnast who added a classical dimension to the ultra-difficult gymnastics needed to overcome the threat of Nadia Comaneci and the entire Romanian team, following the shock of Nadia Comaneci's gold medals at the 1976 Olympics.  Sadly, Elena suffered a very serious injury during training for the 1980 Olympics.   She was paralysed from the neck down, and eventually died in 2006.

For the first ten years after Elena's injury, it was difficult to find any real information on how she was living and what the circumstances of her injury had been.  In about 1988 there was the Russian language Oksana Polonskaya interview  in Ogonyuk - which heavily blames coach Mikhail Klimenko for the accident.  For most of us in the West the first sight we had of Elena for more than ten years was the 1991 documentary 'More Than A Game', which continued in much the same vein.  I read a French language interview (c. 1993?) with Vladislav Rotstorotsky (source unknown) which recalls how the team were training in Minsk, that Elena had decided to stay behind and train while the rest of the team went on a visit to a local art gallery for some rest and relaxation.

Another video resource (late 1990s?) has emerged fairly recently - 'Elena Mukhina - triumph of the spirit' - (see the comments below the video for a good English language translation).  Here, Elena can find some smiles, surrounded by icons of the faith that must have sustained her, but painfully immobile.  She says that she accepted partial responsibility for the decision to continue training on that fateful afternoon.

Vaitsekhovskaya's interview continues that theme, but leaves us in no doubt as to the awful price Elena had to pay for her and her coaches' pursuit of Olympic gold.  There are parts of this interview that are deeply moving in the insight they give into how Elena survived her condition not just physically, but mentally and emotionally.  Direct translations are shown in inverted commas.

The operations Elena had right after the accident left her in a state of coma, her body unable to recover.  She found herself in a position where she could make the decision - to survive - and says she told herself right at the start that she would have to

'radically change my attitude to life.  Do not envy others, and learn to enjoy what was available.  Otherwise, you will go crazy.  I realised that the commandment : 'Think no evil, do no evil, do not envy' - were more than just words.  That between them and the way a person feels, there is a direct connection.  I began to feel this connection.  And I realized that, in comparison with the ability to think, the lack of ability to move - this is such nonsense ...'

Elena suffered a number of injuries during her career - a neck injury and concussion in 1975 after a head first landing into a foam pit; a rib injury on beam in 1977; a leg injury at the end of 1979 from which she was still recovering at the time of her accident.  She says that she gave her coaches every reason to believe that she could continue to train despite the heaviness of her injuries.

'Several times, I saw myself fall in a dream, saw myself carried out of the hall. I knew that, sooner or later, it would actually happen. I felt like an animal that was being driven by a whip along an endless corridor'

Elena was an incredibly strong minded young woman.  All fans of gymnastics should read this interview.


Elena Mukhina - AA, FX gold medallist, 1978 World Championships