Gymn Forum: Sport in the USSR

"We Are a Challenge to Racism"

By Alexander Frenkel

Sport in the USSR, August 1987 The International Moscow News gymnastic tournament was in its last day. Watching the competitions I noticed a fragile girl in the Norwegian team who looked anything but Scandinavian. The team's interpreter explained to me that the girl, Siri Larsen, was a Khmer who had been adopted by a Norwegian couple and lived in Norway. I was told that her adoptive parents were also in the gym and I decided to meet with them.

This was how I became acquainted with Pamela Larsen, a mother of ten children, six of whom were adopted.

"My husband and I love children. As soon as we got married we realized that we needed children and children needed us. Shortly afterwards we adopted our first child who was an orphaned black boy from America. He had a severe leg injury and nobody could tell whether he would walk again. Me and my husband Rikk," she nodded towards a thick-set bespectacled man beside her, on whose back a fair-haired child was sleeping peacefully in a backpack, "realized that children, who not only lost their parents but also were humiliated just because they were different from others, were in most need of parental care."

"In Norway it has become fashionable to adopt children. They try to choose pretty and clever ones, sometimes even buying them from their parents. But we decided that we would provide home and care for those who needed them most. Today we have a large international family in which our own four children live together with a Vietnamese boy and girl, a boy from El Salvador, a black boy, a little American Indian and our darling Siri from Kampuchea. I believe that our family is an example of how people of different races can live together in peace and love. We are a challenge to racism."

"To love children means to hate war," Pamela went on. "Rikk and I have taken part in peace marches together with our children. Rikk is Norwegian, I am American. Sometimes I am ashamed for my country which has inflicted so much suffering and grief on people in Vietnam, Kampuchea and El Salvador. For me adopting children from those countries is also a way of making amends for the wrong my own country has done them."

"Tell me more about Siri, please," I asked her.

"She was found on a road near Pnom Penh by two Canadian nurses. She had just been born and weighed only one kilogram. The nurses put her into a bag and took her to an orphanage. She was the weakest among the forty little orphans who lived there. Then we read in a newspaper about A Girl Out of a Bag. That was Siri. We decided at once to adopt her. Our other children were delighted to have her, but Siri herself, born in a war-ravaged country, remained shy and reserved. We just did not know how to liven her up and make her feel more secure and confident of herself. Then one day we saw a telecast from the Montreal Olympics featuring Soviet girl gymnasts and resolved at a family council that gymnastics was a sport that would breathe life into Siri. After three years of training Siri won her first competition. Today she is 12 and the number one in Scandinavian women's gymnastics."

Having finished her performance, Siri came over to where we were. I asked how she managed to combine her studies with sport.

"I get dead tired. But my father, mother, brothers and sisters always cheer me up. This time my parents and my beloved sister Anika came to Moscow to root for me."