Rewriting Russian Gymnastics

In the autumn of 1989 I travelled to Stuttgart, Germany, for the World Gymnastics Championships. There, I was enthralled by the performance of the best Soviet women's team I ever saw, and the six best floor exercises there have ever been. The videos you will see below are not the best quality, but they have been selected for atmosphere, presenting the exercises in the order they were performed that evening, accompanied by audience sounds. We were all vocal supporters of the Soviet team, that night. National team coach Alexander Alexandrov, interviewed after the competition by a local newspaper (I think it was the Suddeutsche Zeitung) explained how the team had worked with choreographers from Moscow's world famous Bolshoi Theatre. One thing that really strikes me today is how different each floor exercise is, drawing on diverse dance traditions, from the folk-inspired work of Sazonenkova to the modern dance of Boginskaya. Each gymnast's work is a short, consummate...