Boginskaya: I hoped Oksana would retire after Rio

In 1989, Svetlana Boginskaya won three gold medals at the World Championships in Stuttgart – as a part of the Soviet team, in the all-around, and on floor. As she told Dvora Meyers, the medals aren’t what she remembers the most from that competition, it’s the microwave and other gifts she got:

“It sounds funny but my best memory of 1989 Worlds was not my first major all-around win but [the] gifts for winning first place. My team won [the] world title and each of us was given a microwave oven as a gift! Back home, we didn’t even know what a microwave was, much less of its function. I thought to myself that I really wanted more cool gifts and if I win again, I would get something cool again. For my all-around win, I got a vacuum cleaner. I was not too crazy about [that] so I thought I need to win more for a better gift. When I won floor exercise gold, I got a bread machine that I loved!”

To put it into some context, at the time, microwaves weren’t a thing in the USSR. I remember watching “That 70s Show” a few years ago and thinking it was not historically accurate – how could people have automatic washing machines and video recorders in the 70s? I didn’t know such things existed until the 90s, when they finally appeared in my Russian hometown. Soviet athletes usually got access to better things than the rest of the country but even Boginskaya said had no idea what a microwave was before she got one in Stuttgart:

“We were all just shocked by the fact that this thing exists and by how fast it cooks and heats everything.”

In the mixed zone in at the 2019 World Championships, Boginskaya remembered how getting onto the national team was literally a meal ticket for many of the gymnasts:

“On the national team, we were fed better. My family, generally, was pretty poor, we never had enough food at home. On the national team, we were given proteins, meat, steaks, greens, and even fruit which we didn’t normally get as kids in the Soviet Union, when our parents were low on cash.”

Besides microwaves, Soviet people often lacked access to such basic things as toilet paper or sanitary pads (toilet paper was only sometimes available in stores while pads just did not exist in most parts of the USSR). Boginskaya said that athletes also got special access to such goods:

“Of course, if we needed something, the team doctor had his own connections in order to supply things like pads to us because you couldn’t buy such things at the pharmacy.”

Thirty years after her gold(and microwave)-winning performances, Boginskaya came to Stuttgart again, this time as a coach to her long-time friend and former teammate Oksana Chusovitina. Chusovitina was on a quest to qualify to her 8th Olympics. She had not quite the competition she wanted (nagging Achilles pain did not allow her to train at full strength), but managed to beat her own record and become the first gymnast who will go to eight Olympic Games.

Boginskaya said that at the time when they both still competed, she never even entertained the thought of such a long career for her teammate:

“When we were both training, I wasn’t even thinking about a long career for her. I stopped competing, moved to America. Then, she got pregnant and I thought that would be the final part of her career. I thought she would have the baby and start being a mom and work as a coach. Turned out it was not true, she came back and never stopped since then. We had our kids the same year, in 1999, I had a daughter and she had a son.”

Gymnasts are truly not like regular people and Boginskaya who also enjoyed a long career and went to three Olympics, thinks staying in the sport is “not that hard” if you’re training only one event:

“Oksana’s secret is her love for the sport. She truly enjoys it, she enjoys coming to the gym. She’s very strong physically, she loves vault, it’s the kind of event where you need to run fast and jump high. It’s actually not that hard to stay in shape just for one event. But in order to qualify to the Olympics, she needed to do all four events and this is a bit harder for her, especially at her age.”

Chusovitina competed for three countries, on two different vault tables, and under multiple versions of the code of points. Boginskaya thinks it was a bit harder to get used to the open code than to the new vault:

“To switch to the new vaulting table was not so hard for anyone because it’s larger, it pushes you, and it’s even safer. The new code is, generally, not so bad but we all had to get used to it. At the end, everything went into its place and it was not that hard to understand the new scoring system or to vault over the new table.”

For a few quads, Chusovitina would announce her intention to retire after the next Olympics. However, Boginskaya now thinks that even Chusotivina herself doesn’t know when she would actually retire:

“I actually hoped that Oksana would retire after Rio. But when she fell in the vault final, I realized that in a day or two, she’d come to me and say she wasn’t done yet. That’s exactly what happened. We were joking in the hotel here – well, Oksana, you’ll have to train for Paris now. I guess you’ll be a grandma by then, you’ll have grandkids. She said: “Yeah, why not?” She agreed with everything. Of course, it was a joke but each joke has some truth to it.”

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