Mexico City bride and Seoul star: Leningrad gymnasts left their mark on Olympic history

Zigzags of Natalia Kuchinskaya’s fate

Muscovite Mikhail Voronin, Vitebsk resident Larisa Petrik and Leningrad resident Natalya Kuchinskaya each took two gold pieces from Mexico City. The Leningrad gymnast was also awarded the title “Bride of Mexico City.” In the ancient country of the Aztecs, there was a ritual: every year the most beautiful girl was chosen and sacrificed to the gods. In the 20th century, the second part was abandoned, but when envoys from the organizing committee came to the Olympic Village and announced to Kuchinskaya about the high honor, she was indignant: “What kind of bride, I’m a Soviet gymnast!”

In her hometown, Natalya graduated from the famous physics and mathematics school No. 239. Its graduates include not only Fields Medal winners (for mathematicians this is an analogue of the Nobel Prize) Grigory Perelman and Stanislav Smirnov, but also musician Boris Grebenshchikov (included by the Russian Ministry of Justice in the register of individuals performing the functions of a foreign agent ), world chess champion Alexander Khalifman, former Zenit president Sergei Fursenko. Kuchinskaya successfully combined her studies at such a serious school with sports.

Her mother was one of the founders of the Leningrad school of rhythmic gymnastics. She also became the first coach for Natasha and her sister Masha, the future world champion in rhythmic gymnastics in group exercises.

“There was simply no one to leave us with, and my mother took us to the gym,” the Mexico City Olympic champion recalled in an interview. — My sister is calmer in character than me; she stayed in rhythmic gymnastics. And I was running around the hall like crazy, disturbing everyone, and my mother took me to the “adjacent” gymnastics.”

Already at the age of 16, Natalya achieved her first victories at the USSR Championship, and at 17 she won the competition on three apparatuses at the World Championship.

“Kuchinskaya was distinguished by a style associated with incredible complexity for that time, and a soul that manifested itself in every movement,” noted nine-time Olympic champion Larisa Latynina in an interview. “I’m proud to have been the head coach of the team Natasha played for.”

In Mexico City, Soviet gymnasts had to at all costs get ahead of their rivals from Czechoslovakia, led by Tokyo Olympic champion Vera Caslavskaya, in the team all-around. One of the most famous athletes in her country signed the “Two Thousand Words” manifesto, compiled by the famous publicist Ludwik Vaculik. It was a reform program aimed at building “socialism with a human face.”

After army contingents from the Warsaw Pact countries entered Czechoslovakia to suppress the “Prague Spring,” Časlavska at all competitions pointedly turned away from the Soviet gymnasts who stood with her on the podium. The critical moment of the Olympic tournament were the mistakes that the then very young and inexperienced Lyubov Burda and Lyudmila Turishcheva made on their crowning apparatuses. More experienced gymnasts had to insure their teammates, and 19-year-old Kuchinskaya did an excellent job. Although she never managed to get ahead of Caslavska in the individual all-around.

However, this did not stop the expansive Mexicans from showing all kinds of honors to the Bride of Mexico City. Almost the entire male population of the country was ready to give her their hand, heart and bank account. The son of the country’s president showed particular persistence. At the Olympians’ ball, Senor Miguel even made an official proposal to Kuchinskaya, but was refused.

The Mexico City bride married Alexander Kotlyar, a Kiev resident who turned out to be a “workshop worker,” who organized “leftist” production at his native enterprise. The ex-champion’s wife was jailed. At first Natalya brought him parcels, and then filed for divorce. After some time, Kotlyar was released, and he immediately went overseas. Meanwhile, someone in the criminal world thought that Kuchinskaya might still have the capital of the ex-“guild worker,” and Natalya was kidnapped. They demanded a ransom. The intervention of her ex-husband saved her. The woman returned to her native Leningrad, and then signed a contract to train children in Osaka. It was 1991. It was difficult for Natalya in Japan without the support of her family, and at that moment her ex-husband reappeared and called Kuchinskaya to his place. He even bought her a gymnastics club in Illinois. In Russia in the 1990s there was no time for the former champion, and gradually they forgot about the gymnast. However, the half-anniversary of the Mexican Olympics is an occasion to remember the short but bright rise of the Mexico City Bride.

The short life of Elena Shushunova

Over the 20 years that separate Mexico City and Seoul, artistic gymnastics has become incredibly more complex and noticeably younger. Only very young girls were able to perform complex elements close to circus tricks. In the USSR national team, 19-year-old Leningrad gymnast Elena Shushunova was already a veteran. The other five participants in the 1988 Olympics in the USSR women’s artistic gymnastics team were between 15 and 17 years old.

At the sports school, Shushunova was not considered particularly promising, and she was lucky that at the age of 10 she got to coach Viktor Gavrichenkov. Already at 11, Elena fulfilled the standard of an international master of sports and entered the USSR national team, which was incredibly difficult to break into. At 15, Shushunova was considered our main Olympic hope in Los Angeles, but the 1984 Olympics, which could have been her finest hour, were boycotted by the party authorities by the decision of the party authorities.

But at the 1985 World Championships in Montreal, Shushunova shone and, together with Kiev’s Oksana Omelyanchik, shared the title of absolute world champion, also winning the competition in the vault. Once, in a conversation with a journalist from MK in St. Petersburg, Elena admitted that if she had not become a champion in Canada, she might have simply finished gymnastics and there would have been no Olympics in her life.

In Seoul, the highlight of the gymnastics tournament was the duel between Shushunova and Romanian Daniela Silivas. It did not have the same political overtones as the rivalry between Kuczynska and Caslavska in Mexico City. Only Silivas was fantastically strong that year and rightfully bore the title of heir to the legendary Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci.

After the preliminary competitions, the Soviet gymnast was 0.05 points ahead of her main rival. On the first apparatus, her signature vault, Shushunova received the maximum ten, increasing the lead to 0.1. On the uneven bars, Silivash already earned 10 points, and the gymnasts’ scores were equal. The third apparatus is the beam, and Shushunova again takes the lead, receiving 9.925 for her exercise, 0.025 more than Silivash. For floor exercises, both gymnasts received the maximum tens – and Shushunova became the Olympic champion!

These competitions were the last in the career of the Leningrad gymnast.

“I still had plenty of physical strength, but I was incredibly exhausted psychologically,” Elena recalled. “Then I just needed to rest for a month or two, but instead the coaches forced me to work harder every day in training. At one point I couldn’t stand it and left forever.”

After that, Shushunova tried her hand at judging, participated in professional tournaments, where the loads were not so great, and in gymnastics shows. And then she simply disappeared from sports life. Having had a minor accident, Elena stopped at a car service center and met her future husband there. I gave birth to a son and decided that I was done with sports forever.

By her own admission, the Seoul Olympic champion spent three years in “underground.” Just at this time, the Northern capital was preparing to host the Goodwill Games. Shushunova herself offered her services. She worked on the organizing committee, then on the City Sports Committee, and taught at the Pedagogical University. Herzen. In 2018, Elena’s life was tragically cut short: she was hospitalized with advanced pneumonia, and doctors were unable to save her. The Olympic champion did not even live to see 50.

Shushunova was in some ways ahead of her time in gymnastics. In floor exercises, she performed a jump, which in slang was called a “shushka”: the gymnast made a 180-degree turn and landed in a prone position. Something on the verge of acrobatics and fantasy. Among modern athletes, only the leader of the American team, Simone Biles, can perform it. When Shushunova herself performed it, Soviet gymnasts had no equal at the Olympics. No one from the new generation of the Russian team can repeat this element.