Rewriting Russian Gymnastics

I'm often talking here of gymnastics as a sporting cultural form.  A cultural form is the physical or material manifestation of beliefs, traditions and identity and is constantly changing in response to social, political and economic shifts, and vulnerable to the forces of globalisation.  Sporting cultural forms are especially fragile as they can be subject to direct intervention in matters of taste or regulation by political administrative bodies often more interested in TV income or the bottom line than in the cultural 'health' of their sporting form.  In gymnastics terms, this could be interpreted as meaning that the power of the dollar usually speaks more loudly than, for example, the intrigue of the classical or the appeal of folk tradition. Artistic gymnastics has seen more than its fair share of intervention over the past twenty five years or so as it has adapted to a new world order.  The FIG makes continual changes to the Code of Points and to competition...