Olga Korbut first publicly accused her coach, Renald Knysh, of raping and physically abusing her in 1999, long before the #metoo movement. Knysh continues to deny the accusations and Korbut continues to insist on them. This week, Olga Korbut was again a guest on a Russian tv show “Pust Govoryat” (Let them talk) in which she was again asked about the rape allegations and then had to face Knysh during via Skype.
Korbut explained that she decided to speak up in order to prevent this from happening to other girls:
“I stayed silent for so many years until it started happening with another girl, who went to the police. I told myself: I have to stop it. That’s why I spoke up. Perhaps, I would have stayed silent forever. If I stayed silent, he would continue raping, that’s why I spoke up”.
There was at least one other known fact of rape allegations towards Knysh from a gymnast he coached in 1981: he talks about it in one of the interviews. The girl tried to commit suicide and after the attempt told her parents she was raped by Knysh when she was 14. Knysh claims that the girl was a virgin (in USSR rape had to include vaginal penetration) and that is why the charges were dropped. Korbut and Leonid Bortkevich, her husband at the time, actually went to the prosecution to vouch for Knysh back then – she explains that at the time she was in denial about what happened to her and felt like she owed him a lot and needed to keep him out of jail:
“After me, he started preparing a girl for the same thing and the girl told her parents. She told her parents and they wanted to put him in jail – that’s why Leonid and I went [to the prosecution], I couldn’t stand it [him being put in jail] because he did a lot for me and back then I wasn’t yet telling that he raped me. But when I saw how it hurts throughout my whole life… This wound doesn’t heal, believe me”.
Since Korbut talks about speaking up in order to prevent further rapes and she went public only in 1999, it might be that she’s talking about some other case that happened later.
Bortkevich claimed that Knysh was grooming Korbut in order to marry her later when she would be of age. That might seem less unlikely if we keep in mind that Tamara Alexeeva, Knysh’s first wife, was one of his pupils first. When asked about the marriage, Korbut said that she’s not sure whether her coach wanted to marry her but he’s been molesting her for years and then got her drunk and raped her shortly before the Munich Olympics.
“He was molesting me and then in the end, right before the Olympics Games, he just raped me. It’s the truth. And you know, I live with it, and honestly, it’s very hard. Very hard. Of course, I hid it all, I felt such shame, so much shame. It happened in Minsk, in the “Yubileynaya” hotel, right before the Olympic Games, when I turned 17″.
She was then asked by the host whether the intercourse could have been consensual (as if sex between a 40-year-old coach and his 17-year-old pupil who he’s been coaching for years is a normal thing and can be consensual). Korbut denied it:
“No. No. Even when he went to America for the first time he called me to his room and he stopped traveling anywhere after that. Because he was caught by the security there and they said “no” [wags her finger]. It happened, in America. And that was it, he stopped traveling with me and almost stopped any connections to me. Because, it’s not that he was ashamed, he thought that the Americans would start saying something”.
Korbut also claimed that Knysh regularly beat her up, including one time when her eardrum was damaged and she couldn’t train for a week.
While Knysh was never found guilty of rape or abuse, he stopped coaching in the early 1980s after the first rape allegations, moved to another city and could not get a coaching job for many years. He moved back to Grodno (Korbut’s native town) in the 1990s and briefly returned to coaching but claims that the gymnasts he trained were not good enough and he decided to stop.
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