Sovetsky Sport. September 19, 1982. For the first time, 22-year-old Army competitor from Lvov, Bogdan Makuts, and 17-year-old Dinamo competitor from Rostov, Natalia Yurchenko, became the all-around champions of the USSR in gymnastics.
Both won without much competition. The men were fighting for silver, and the all-around world champion Yuri Korolev, like his famous countryman Nikolai Andrianov, first created difficulties for himself, then valiantly rushed to overcome them but couldn't close the distance. On the last apparatus, the horizontal bar, he had to get 9.95 in order to beat Pavel Sut. He famously performed two high Tkachev flights in a row but received only 9.8. Alexander Dityatin did not compete in the finals - he caught a cold.
Makuts gave an interview to All-Union Radio, and when I said that it came out very smoothly and eloquently, he responded: "It seems to me that I have been preparing it for many years - I won second at the national championship, and third and fourth, but never first." He said he went to the hotel to listen to the soulful songs of the famous singer Iglesias on TV together with his frequent roomate and friend Artur Akopyan, whose injury sincerely upset the cordial and friendly Bodya Makuts. By the way, there's nothing serious with Akopyan's leg - it's just a bruise.
As for Yurchenko, a margin of almost 0.8 points gave her complete security of her position. But the only event she made no mistakes was vault. Her coach V. Rastorotsky sulked and grumbled at her all the time (purely childishly, as always) and she, as always, forgave him in a purely feminine sporting way. Afterwards, he told me that the first person that appreciated it was Turischeva. But not in a sporting way. "Natasha," she told the coach, "is like me, she doesn't tolerate disorder in anything. Everything is clean and sorted into shelves, that's her character." Rastorotsky also told me this: "In Chekov, how is it? Everything must be beautiful in a person, their face, their clothes, their soul, their thoughts. That's why I love Yurcha. Only, her clothes are her muscles, which are wonderful."
Once again, at the USSR Cup, he celebrated a double victory: another of his students, Albina Shishova, won silver. And Olya Mostepanova literally snatched the bronze. Falling off the uneven bars and beam, she pulled herself together and danced on floor, performed her second diagonal with double twists in a row, with ardent inspiration, which brightened up the pale picture of her performance on this apparatus (I will return to the problem of floor exercise in the next report).
Now, the preliminary results. This is not the first time you admit to yourself that while the men's part of the All-Union competition is pleasant to watch, the women's part evokes exactly the opposite feeling. As one of the experts on the podium said: "Every now and then your heart freezes with fear - you look to the left and they are falling off the uneven bars, you look to the right and they are flying off the beam with their foreheads into the mats, and when you look ahead they are flattening themselves on the floor mat." I didn't count the number of falls, but I can say that while 22 men scored the sum of points corresponding to a Master of Sports International Class, the number of girls that met that standard was 2. And for the Master of Sports - 9 girls (out of 76 participants in the competition).
What's going on? Looking for an answer, I will recall how a young coach told me about his search for novelties. "I saw something at the world championships - for example, from Gnauck, and I walk around and think - is this the way she holds her hands? Or this way? Well, I'll try it on my girls." But the "current" method can be dangerous when applied to living beings - children. And there are no movie cameras in the coaches' hands. The now-classic memory of how Japanese gymnasts defeated our men with movie cameras in the middle of the century seems to have taught us little. Few people noticed at the Moscow world championships that even the head of the GDR women's team, Sauer, was armed with a camera. But we are accustomed not to studying, but to teaching...
Meanwhile, I think that today the main issue is that the growth of coaching education in the masses has lagged behind the rapid growth of technical complexity (the movie camera is an individual fact). Many mistakes are caused by the fact that many women's gymnastics specialists have a poor grasp of modern profiling elements - much weaker than men's coaches (although the basics of technique are the same), and they often neglect the summarizing exercises. Neglected, because they are in a hurry to "get the product out." And the hasty dropouts, together with their one-day students, appear on the outskirts of the national team as quickly as they disappear (who, like Rastorotsky, has been producing top-class athetes for 16 years? Nobody.).
They will ask me, "what, were you born yesterday?" The new senior coach of the women's team, Andrei Rodionenko, threw the same accusation - why, he said, did I remain silent before? And I accepted the accusation: after all, everything had been accumulating before our eyes, both when A. Shaniyazov was at the helm, and when L. Latynina was. I'm not panicking. I'm simply stating that Rodionenko has inherited a poor legacy. But I firmly believe in his intelligence and knowledge, which he showed as coach of the men's junior team, creating a strong reserve for L. Arkaev. We have had difficult times before, we have endured them, overcome them, and now we will certainly overcome them again. To do so we just have to face the truth.
TECHNICAL RESULTS
48th USSR gymnastics championship. Chelyabinsk.
All-around. Half the sum of the compulsory and optional rounds, plus the optional all-around results. Finals scores are in brackets.
Men. 1. B. Makuts (Army) - 115.65 (9.7, 9.65, 9.75, 9.5, 9.5, 9.8); 2. P. Sut (Trud) - 114.525 (9.5, 9.45, 9.55, 9.4, 9.65, 9.75); 3. Yu. Korolev (Spartak) - 114.4 (9.8, 9.6, 9.5, 9.45, 9.65, 9.8); 4. S. Martsinkiv (Army) - 114.25; 5. D. Bilozerchev (Army) - 113.725; 6. V. Artemov (Burvestnik) - 113.575.
Women. 1. N. Yurchenko (Dinamo) - 76.75 (9.9, 9.4, 9.35, 9.4); 2. A. Shishova (Dinamo) - 76.05 (9.8, 9.5, 9.8, 9.6); 3. O. Mostepanova (Dinamo) - 75.075 (9.7, 8.55, 8.95, 9.9); 4. L. Kovalenko (Army) - 75.025; 5. E. Prusova (Trud) - 73.9; 6. E. Veselova (Dinamo) - 73.45.
S. TOKAREV