Rewriting Russian Gymnastics

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...