Rewriting Russian Gymnastics

  This story of a 'new girl' on the talented Soviet women's gymnastics team, just prior to the 1968 Olympics, hardly needs to be presented as a fictional drama.  The coach, as in all these films, is tall, dark and handsome, with a brooding sense of being in control of all he surveys, but that's where the fiction ends.  Whoever did the casting for this film had an incredible talent for finding Soviet gymnast lookalikes, and I won't need to tell you who was who in the plot, as it's perfectly obvious.  The only one I'm unsure of is Novenkaya, the new girl, herself.  I think it's Natalia Kuchinskaya, but I'm not completely sure, because the Director of this film has cut the timeframe about a little bit. The members of the squad depicted here are a young Tamara Lazakovitch (no sign of the whisky yet, but very spirited), Ludmilla Tourischeva, who is sweetly played as a smiling but very serious young woman, Larissa Petrik, Olga Karasova, Polina Astakhova (...