Touching the Heart by David Miller

Author:David Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitch Publishing
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

OLGA KORBUT

Unprecedented Extravagance

‘Gymnastics is all about expression’

I have previously mentioned the tendency of sports commentators to exaggerate, to suggest that a performer ‘changed the face’ of their sport. Yet in one unforgettable instance this was abundantly true. There we were, at Munich’s Olympic Games in 1972, duly impressed with West Germany’s modern new stadia – track and field, swimming, basketball – with our expectations preoccupied with the sprinting of Soviet cheetah Valery Borzov, Finland’s defending track phenomenon Lasse Virén, US dolphin Mark Spitz, all of us unaware of impending terrorist doom. Suddenly we were assailed by frantic office telex messages from back home – ancient communication! – demanding, ‘What about Olga??’ To which for most of us the answer was, ‘Olga who?’

‘Revelation’ is another epithet overused, but not here. While the majority of correspondents habitually covering a Games are necessarily multi-tasked amid 30 sports, gymnastics was then widely regarded as an esoteric exercise that had been – and continued to be – dominated across 30 years by largely expressionless Soviet automatons, assembled at gymnastic factories in a mood of social/political ideology. The Olympics, surely, were more about dramatic triumph or spectacular failure, were they not? But no: diminutive, sparrow-like Olga Korbut, a 17-year-old from satellite Belarus, as supple as an elastic band, was transforming her sport, and a vast television audience, with an unprecedented extravagance which overturned preconceived principles of gymnastics.

To such a degree did Korbut seize attention, both of existing aficionados and the suddenly addicted, that there was some lingering scepticism. My late, esteemed fellow commentator, John Rodda of The Guardian, more a track specialist, was moved to write dismissively of Korbut 24 years later, in the IOC’s six-language official centenary history of 1996, ‘Television ruthlessly now distorted the very basic measure of sporting excellence.’ Not for Joe Public, it didn’t. Often smiling, sometimes tearful at errors, athletically experimental and occasionally alarming, Korbut gave the Olympics a new dimension, even if sections of establishment international federation officialdom remained unimpressed at the time. Eleven months after Munich, Korbut’s backward somersault on the beam was for a while banned, supposedly considered dangerous. To this accusation, Korbut, threatening to quit the sport, declared, ‘Gymnasts are not immune to injury … people don’t ask my opinion … gymnastics is all about expression.’

Olga Valentinovna Korbut was born in May 1955 in Hrodna, Belarus, and as a teenager was a mere 4ft 11in (1.50m) and six stone. Aged nine, she was assigned to one of the USSR’s exclusive gymnastics schools, initially coached by Yelene Volchestskaya, herself an Olympic medal winner in 1964, prior to Olga switching aged 12 to head coach Renald Knysh: a man with imaginative ambition for the sport and for Korbut. History, and controversy, awaited them.

Aged 14, Korbut made her first conspicuous appearance at the Soviet National Championships of 1969, a year younger than the normal admission and finishing fifth, yet already losing marks for an ‘unconventional’ style. In the next two years, winning the individual vault at 15, she was fourth

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