Rewriting Russian Gymnastics - history and methodology

 I began Rewriting Russian Gymnastics in 2010, 16 years ago.  I wanted to write for publication.  After about a decade of writing in my professional capacity as a University lecturer about museums management, I needed a break and the subject of gymnastics had always fascinated me, without fail.

Gymnastics in Russia had been a lifelong interest for me and I had been writing on various forums for years - Gymworld and IG forums were my favourites.  The discussion and debate was quite fierce.  So I decided to try my hand at blogging, and to see if I could create something meaningful that went beyond the usual arguments about Khorkina's scores and Ferrari's leotards.

The development of our collective understanding of the world of gymnastics since that time has gone hand in hand with the development of the internet and in particular social media.  In respect of social media, we seem to have come full circle since the 1960s, but more about that later in another post.  

We began with fandom, and the various forums that facilitated our discussions.  There were some big fan websites, and some of those accommodated videos of individual routines.  The Federations had good websites, and the Russian Gymnastics Federation was (and still is) one of the best.  

I began by writing about the aesthetic development of the sport, trying to link my thinking to ideas in the academic literature.  I wanted to write about Soviet gymnastics, its history and the relationship between its development and social, cultural and political factors in the former Soviet Union.  I wanted to tell my readers how much I had always enjoyed Soviet and Russian gymnastics and why.  I wanted to talk about the humans I saw in gymnastics and how the sport was about friendship.

After a while, I managed to plug into some Russian language sources.  While I don't speak Russian I do read a bit of the language, enough to be able to transliterate names and scores, who coached whom and where each individual gymnast trained.  Also, to identify materials that needed to be translated.

Eventually the early machine translators became available.  They weren't very good for translations of specialist text about sport in Russian, but they did give me an overview.  Some very good people came forward and helped with some quality translation.  I befriended Vladimir Zaglada, a great international coach who had trained some of the best Soviet women gymnasts at his club, Moscow Dynamo, and at the Soviet National Training Centre.  He had worked in the UK at a senior level, and had friendly intentions towards the west.  

The gradual improvement of machine translation and the hard work of some translators meant that I could begin to make sense of some of the stories in the Russian press.  This went hand in hand with some events in the sport, leading me to identify the redevelopment and resurgence of Russian gymnastics as a key theme in the sport's narrative.  Hence the blog's title, Rewriting Russian Gymnastics - we were literally beginning again in telling the story of the sport.

In 2010 two extremely talented women gymnasts from Russia emerged, Russia won the world championships.  Thanks to the training of Alexander Alexandrov, and with the continuing emergence of other great gymnasts, Russia had reclaimed its strength in depth, and found a place at the top of the world sport.  

But that couldn't last forever as internecine conflict between some of the senior coaches kicked off.  

Narrating this story, which was as much a media phenomenon as a reflection of events in the sport, helped me to see between the lines of the power relationships involved in the running of the sport in Russia from Ministry level down to the individual gymnasts and their coaches.  Fans jumped on the bandwagon and this all became bigger than the sport itself in Russia.  Individual personalities were picked on, and with hindsight I'm not sure it was all terribly fair.  What has been learned cannot be unlearned, but now we can take a step back and take a broader view.

It was perhaps the first time that Russian gymnastics found itself in the spotlight in the English language press.  While the Russians might have seen this as a double edged sword at the time, I have to thank the RGF for always being faithful and open in their communications with the rest of the world.  Now, at the most difficult era in our relationship, when the Russian Government has removed many athletes' access to social media, the RGF still remains loyal to us, and still provides us with stories that tell us the best of their gymnastics.  It's closer to professional PR and brand management than I'd personally like, but the strand of friendship is still there for us to pick up in better times. 

After a period of time when I followed the gymnasts on their social media channels, I'm now left with a thin vein of information with which to develop storylines.  We don't know where Russian gymnastics is going in the coming decades or indeed if it will go anywhere at all.  Russia hasn't experienced the tell-all tales of abuse and inappropriate treatment that other leading countries have, but the IOC well and truly stopped gymnastics in its tracks by banning the Russian team from international competition.  This has virtually killed off the sport in Russia, even though the coaches and gymnasts are making a good job of coming back at present.  

We need to examine the wider sport without Russia, and the hole that was left in their absence.  Gymnastics is cold and uninteresting without our Russians.  How will they fill that gap as they become rehabilitated into the sporting community?

I promised shorter, single points in my new blog posts and I've already failed.  That's because I think as I write and nothing is ever as simple as it seems.  I'll come back in a few days and try to hitch some more themes together.  Thanks for your patience.