Into the Shadow of Russian Gymnastics - the Life and Death of Elena Mukhina

Part One of a continuing series

I have a strong belief that Russia has contributed a great deal more to gymnastics that is positive than negative.  But without acknowledging the darkness, we cannot appreciate the light; and for most people, the story of 1978 World Champion, Elena Mukhina, casts the deepest shadow.

Elena was born on June 1, 1960 in Moscow.  She came from a broken family; her nearest relative was her grandmother, who brought her up from an early age.  Elena remembered her first steps in gymnastics and how excited she was to be selected to train.  From the age of 14 she was coached by Mikhail Klimenko at the Central Army Club in Moscow.  Klimenko remembered his first impressions of her as a somewhat unsmiling girl, who had still to achieve her best in gymnastics.  With his help, by 1978, Elena had become the all around World Champion in gymnastics.

A shadow casts itself over my shoulder at this moment.  You can’t appreciate the light without considering the shade.  So I will talk this through with you, and try to understand.

In case you are wondering, I am not about to write a ghost story.  However, sadness envelopes me whenever I think of Elena Mukhina.  Elena, the 1978 World Champion, broke her neck in 1980, just prior to the Moscow Olympic Games.  She never recovered from her terrible injuries and eventually died in 2006, at the age of 46.  I cannot find a way of expressing the loss and anguish.  Elena’s accident was a calamity for everyone involved, near and far.

Elena was less than a year younger than me.  As I write this, she is sitting next to me.  She has just turned 62.  Perhaps she is Director of a gymnastics facility, or a choreographer, or a coach at the national training centre.  Maybe she is living in the United States, working as a coach, or perhaps she still remains in her small apartment in Moscow, caring for her grandchildren.  None of this really matters, as Elena is living her life to the full.

But this Elena is a shadow, created of impressions of the person she might have become.   Elena, dancing gracefully across the floor mat; Elena, corkscrewing through the air high above the asymmetric bars; Elena, in motion.  Elena, the quiet girl with shy eyes who suddenly became a champion.  Elena, in silence, her spirit cocooned in a motionless body.

International gymnastics has suffered its share of tragedies over the years, not all of them in the Soviet Union or Russia.  Elena’s accident, however, has attracted the most attention.  Coaches have been vilified.  The whole episode is considered to characterise the Soviet Union’s gymnastics system.  The mantra ‘win at all costs’.  There have been too many other tragedies in the sport, all of them equally difficult for families and friends.  Blame is often cast about, but rarely has there been such continuing innuendo and guilt as that associated with the long, slow death of Elena Mukhina.    

At the time of Elena’s accident, the Soviet Union team was trying to recover its leading position in world gymnastics.  Nadia Comaneci was reigning Olympic and European Champion, and Romania were World team champions.   Romania’s national coaches, Bela and Marta Karolyi, had trained their gymnasts to perform high levels of technical difficulty, leaving the lyrical Soviets looking as if they were standing still, marooned in a puddle of past glories.  Head coach Larissa Latynina was sacked after the 1976 Olympics and a new head coach – Aman Shaniazov – took her place.  Soviet gymnastics had anticipated the ‘new era’ of technical gymnastics that they now faced, with very young girls such as Natalia Shaposhnikova and Maria Filatova already figuring on national team rosters.  But the Soviet Union had lost its leading position in the sport for a while.  Considering the pressures that this introduced might help us to understand the mistakes that led to Elena’s accident. 

It’s easy to take the shorthand of Soviet sport : ‘victory at all costs’ and to gloss over its full meaning.  It is really only possible to begin to appreciate the amount of pressure under which coaches and athletes were working at that time, by looking backwards to another time of more pressure, when fierce reprisals were taken in the case of failure.  While these reprisals had been removed well before the time of Nadia Comaneci, they still rest heavily in Soviet sports history.  You will often read a gymnast saying that they didn’t have to sign anything to say they had to win.  But what was it like, competing for a country where the sporting philosophy was, literally, ‘win at all costs’?  As we consider the life of Elena Mukhina we might come to remember that the pressures were too great for the minds and bodies of the young girls who produced the all important victories.  That the coaches carried an impossible burden.