Elena Mukhina


Elena Vyacheslavovna Mukhina was a Soviet gymnast who won the all-around title at the 1978 World Championships in Strasbourg, France. Her career was on the rise and she was widely touted as the next great gymnastics star until 1979 when a broken leg left her out of several competitions, and the recovery from that injury combined with pressure to master a dangerous and difficult tumbling move caused her to break her neck just two weeks before the opening of the 1980 Summer Olympics, leaving her permanently quadriplegic just one month past the age of 20.

Early life

Elena Mukhina was born June 1, 1960 in Moscow, Russian SFSR. She lost her mother by the time she was five years old. She was raised by her grandmother, Anna Ivanovna.

Career

Mukhina took an interest in gymnastics and figure skating at an early age. When an athletic scout visited her school, she eagerly volunteered to try out for gymnastics. She later joined the CSKA Moscow sports club. In recognition of her accomplishments, Mukhina was inducted into the CSKA Hall of Fame.
Up until 1975, Mukhina was an unremarkable gymnast, and Soviet coaches largely ignored her. Then, two separate incidents brought her skills to the forefront for the Soviet team: Romanian domination of the Soviet gymnastics machine at the 1976 Olympics ; and Mukhina's transition to working with men's coach Mikhail Klimenko, who transformed her into one of the most show-stopping gymnasts of her time. She burst onto the scene at the 1978 World Championships in Strasbourg, France. In one of the most stunning all-around performances in history, she won the gold medal, beating out Olympic Champions Nadia Comăneci and top-ranked Soviet gymnast Nellie Kim, among others. She also tied for the gold medal in the floor exercise event final, as well as winning the silver in balance beam and uneven bars. She made history in this competition by unveiling her signature moves: a full-twisting layout Korbut Flip on bars; a tucked double back salto dismount on beam ; and a full-twisting double back somersault on floor dubbed the "Muchina". Yet, in spite of these innovations, Mukhina maintained the classic Soviet style, inspired by ballet movements and expressive lines. She quickly established herself as an athlete to watch for at the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow.
A documentary film of the Soviet national team features Mukhina talking with her coach, Mikhail Klimenko, and footage of her rigorous training regimen.

Injury

Mukhina's floor exercise tumbling passes were considered revolutionary at the time because they included a never-before seen combination salto, but in 1979, her coach wanted her to become one of the few female gymnasts doing an element taken from men's gymnastics, the Thomas salto. Even though she won the All Around title and floor exercises at the 1978 world championship with daring bar routines, a revolutionary balance beam dismount, and a floor routine with its own signature move, she was pressured to add this element to her floor exercises by her own coach and other higher-ranking Soviet coaches. Mukhina soon realized the Thomas salto was extremely dangerous because it depended on being able to get enough height and speed to make all the flips and mid-air twists and still land in-bounds with enough room to do the forward roll, and it took near-perfect timing to avoid either under-rotation or over-rotation. In the 1991 documentary More than a Game, Mukhina spoke of trying to convince her coach that the Thomas salto was a dangerous element:
In 1979, while training for the 1979 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships, Mukhina suffered a broken leg, which kept her out of the World Championships in Fort Worth, Texas, a competition in which the Soviet team suffered its first defeat at the hands of their archrivals from Romania, with only Nellie Kim and Stella Zakharova able to medal in apparatus and All Around disciplines. With less than a year until the 1980 Summer Olympics to be held in Moscow, the pressure was on the Soviet team coaches and doctors to get the previous All Around champion Mukhina back on her feet and ready for the games. In an interview with Ogonyok magazine, Mukhina blamed the doctors at TsITO who were serving the National Team for attempting to rush her back into training too soon, saying she begged them not to remove her cast and discharge her because "they're dragging me from home to workouts" and she knew she was not yet healed. When doctors removed her cast against her wishes and had her try walking on the leg, she said that she knew she was walking "crookedly" and that something was not right. The TsITO doctors X-rayed the leg and discovered that the fracture had not healed properly and would not be able to sustain the pounding of gymnastics in its present condition. Mukhina was rushed into surgery that afternoon, but the damage had already been done to her reputation; one of the National Team coaches, she said in the Ogonyok interview, showed up at her bed the day after surgery and outright stated that she "wasn't conscientious" and that she could still "train in a cast". Once more against her wishes, the doctors removed her cast prematurely, and Mukhina returned to training for the Olympics while beginning a strenuous workout program at CSKA Moscow to lose the weight she had gained while laid up from surgery.
With lingering weakness in her leg and mounting exhaustion from the grueling weight loss workouts, Mukhina had great difficulty coming back up to speed on what was to be the new end element of one of her floor exercise tumbling passes, the Thomas salto. Despite Mukhina's warnings that the element was constantly causing minor injuries and was dangerous enough to potentially cause major injuries, she was pushed to keep the element in her floor routine, and she continued to practise it even knowing it was a dangerous element. On July 3, 1980, two weeks before the Moscow Olympics, Mukhina was practicing the pass containing the Thomas salto when she under-rotated the salto and crash-landed on her chin, snapping her spine. She was instantly rendered a quadriplegic. Mukhina was training at the Minsk Palace of Sport when the injury occurred; her coach Klimenko was not present at the time of the accident. The Soviet Union awarded her Order of the Badge of Honour in 1980 in response to her injury, and then in 1982 or 1983, Juan Samaranch, the IOC President, awarded her the Silver Medal of the Olympic Order.
Following the injury, the Soviet Gymnastics Federation remained secretive about the events surrounding Mukhina's cataclysmic injury, with Soviet Team Coach Yuri Titov as the point man discouraging reporters' questions by playing coy regarding Mukhina's condition and deflecting inquiries about whether she would be trying for a comeback in 1984, even blaming Mukhina's "injury" on attempting a skill that she "was not able to do but thought she needed to make the teamshe suffered injury and missed her chance.All the bad stories, they are not true." Meanwhile, as word spread among the Olympic community that Mukhina's injuries were far worse than the Soviet spokesmen were saying, coaches all over the world wondered not only what the specific injury was, but how the accident had happened. Initial rumors were that she had fallen on approach to the vault, then Soviet newspapers reported she had fallen during her dismount from the balance beam and had a blackout but then got back up to finish her floor exercise without knowing how badly she had been injured, then finally word emerged that she had fallen catastrophically during the floor exercise. Mukhina became reclusive following the accident, and rarely discussed it publicly. In one of her few interviews about the accident, published in Ogonyok magazine, she criticized the Soviet gymnastics program for deceiving the public about her injury, and for the system's insatiable desire for gold medals and championships:
Despite this, Mukhina took some of the responsibility for not saying no to protect herself from further harm, and noted that her first thought as she lay on the floor with her neck severely broken was, "Thank God, I won't be going to the Olympics."

Aftermath

According to Larisa Latynina's 2004 interview, Mukhina's trainer, Mikhail Klimenko, was affected by her injury. Because of her devastating injury, Mukhina could not be added to the 1980 Soviet Olympic team roster. There was little doubt that the Soviet Olympic women's gymnastics team would get the gold medal in the team competition at the 1980 Summer Olympics, as it had at all previous Olympics. Nevertheless, Klimenko had desperately wanted Mukhina to make the Olympic team roster because he wanted to become the "Olympic champion's trainer." Soon after Mukhina's paralytic injury, Klimenko emigrated to Italy, where he lived with his children until his death from cancer on November 14, 2007, his 65th birthday.
After Mukhina's paralysis and several other close calls with other Olympic-eligible female gymnasts, the Thomas salto was removed from the Code of Points as an allowed skill for women. It remained an allowed skill for men as of 2013, but as of the 2017–2020 quad, rollout skills were banned for both men and women.
Her condition notwithstanding, Mukhina was a guest columnist for Moscow News in the late 1980s. Her injury was a featured topic in the 1990 A&E documentary More Than a Game; and her World Championship performance is captured in the ABC Sports video Gymnastics' Greatest Stars. Mukhina took a keen interest in children and young gymnasts both before and after her injury. She also expressed a deep religious faith, and was fond of horses and animated cartoons. Mukhina was thankful to her former teammates who kept in touch with her, especially Yelena Davydova, whom she described as "A real friend".

Death

Mukhina died of apparent complications from quadriplegia on. As a memorial to one of the greatest Soviet-era gymnasts ever, the biggest sports newspaper in Russia, Sovietskij SPORT, dedicated the cover of its Christmas 2006 issue to her. A memorial service was held in her honor on December 27, and she was buried at the Troekourov Cemetery in Moscow.

Achievements

YearEventAATeamVTUBBBFX
1977World Cup1st1st
1977European Championships2nd3rd1st1st1st
1977USSR Championships2nd3rd1st
1977USSR Cup2nd
1978World Championships1st1st2nd2nd1st
1978USSR Championships1st1st3rd
1979European Championships1st2nd
1979USSR Championships1st

Eponymous skills