Skip to main content

Yuri Korolev, great Soviet champion, has died age 60

Sad news - the great Soviet champion Yuri Korolev has died, aged 60.  Korolev was a great coach, very loved by his gymnasts and hugely respected in Russia.  Korolev was World AA champion in both 1981 and 1985, and took the silver AA in 1987.  He amassed a total of 14 gold medals across three World Championships and 3 Europeans.  The sadness of Korolev’s career was that he never competed at an Olympics - the Soviet boycott of 1984 denied him LA, and he snapped his Achilles tendon just before the 1988 Games.  …Yuri was one of a dynasty of champion gymnasts who came from the beautiful city of Vladimir in Russia.  He trained at the same club as Nikolai Andrianov and Vladimir Artemov, Yuri Ryazunov and Kirill Prokopyev.   Nikolai Kuksenkov also chose to train there during his time on the Russian national team.  Russia’s bar coach, Sergei Andrianov reported the sad news.


Yuri was blond and handsome and very modest.  We will miss him and our prayers are with his loved ones.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGr85BA-iEU


UPDATE, 22.00 


Local TV has confirmed the circumstances of Yuri Korolev’s untimely death.  The former champion and coach was living and working in his home town, Vladimir.  Last night he had a heart attack and was rushed into hospital where he stayed overnight.  He sadly died earlier today.


Fellow coach, Vitaly Ivanchuk, has confirmed that there will be a memorial for Yuri on the 3rd May.  Rest in Peace, dear Yuri,


https://vladtv.ru/society/144142/?fbclid=IwAR3mgFzypdgcofBAvTHMreVLVeOkemzK2vXdWyzffL-VQki_RUp2IBq-SC0



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

30 years in elite sport: Oksana Chusovitina

You've been competing internationally for over 30 years. How has gymnastics changed over that time? Is there anything about your sport that has remained the same for decades? First of all, the age has changed. More mature athletes are competing now, which makes me happy. Secondly, the apparatuses. They've become more comfortable and sophisticated. Gymnastics in general has become more challenging, but in my youth, people performed mostly the same elements as they do now. Back then, this was par for the course, but now it surprises many. It's a bit amusing. Has the nature of the training itself changed? For me personally, absolutely. Now, my life isn't just about my athletic career. I'm involved with the Oksana Chusovitina Academy, which was personally opened by the President of Uzbekistan, Shavkat Mirziyoyev. It has 155 students, both girls and boys. I used to train three times a day, but now I train once. The entire afternoon is taken up with the academy and organi...

Tatyana Nabiyeva on work and love in China

Some highlights from a long interview with 2010 World champion Tatyana Nabiyeva.  Source: Russian team page on VK.com.  Translation - Google translate A big interview with Tatyana Nabieva about the peculiarities of work and life in China, the bright years of her sports career, a little about modern gymnastics and about love. On the Nabiyeva flight — At the same championship, you presented a new element on the bars, which was later added to the rules with your last name (flying over the top bar with a straight body, difficulty group F. — Sport24). How did you come up with the idea to try something new? — Actually, it happened spontaneously, I think. We worked with Vera Iosifovna [Kiryashova] on the purity of the elements on the bars, sometimes I didn’t fly all the way to the Shaposhnikova element. Once I didn’t fly all the way to the bars either and stood on my feet between the bars, bending my legs in flight for safety. Then Vera Iosifovna said that this was a different eleme...

Viktoria Komova - Happy Birthday!

Viktoria Komova, born 30th January 1995, celebrates her birthday today.  Happy Birthday, Viktoria! Have a lovely day. Time to revisit a picture gallery posted last year ... and to hope for a good year for Viktoria and her fans. I was doing something far more important, researching an article, when these pictures of Viktoria Komova  caught my eye. They are far from the standard gymnastics pictures of gymnasts celebrating, commiserating, or caught in the midst of their most graceful pose.  Not the best, most aesthetic images to view.  When looking at pictures of gymnasts I am often conscious of selecting the ones taken from the most flattering angle, avoiding the shot with the bent legs, the out of control arms. I took a different viewpoint here, choosing Komova at the most stressed, the least stagey point of her work.  These pictures capture Komova in flight, in the height of motion and effort.  There is no contrivance to them, no trained pose or pause...

RRG Archive - scroll by date, from 2024 to 2010

Show more