Last month, Oksana Chusovitina opened her 2021 season with a bronze on vault at the Varna World Cup. Chusovitina said in an interview to Bulgarian media, that she recently dealt with an injury but is feeling fine already and wanted to test herself in competition and see what else she needs to work on. Normally, Chusovitina travels extensively around the world for competitions, master classes, and gymnastics shows, but this year she mostly had to stay in her native Uzbekistan. She spent some time training in Germany when her gym in Uzbekistan closed down to serve as a temporary hospital for COVID-19 patients.
Chusovitina talked to Elena Vaytsekhovskaya of RT about training for the Olympics once again and how the lockdown affected her.
Q: Two years ago, at the World Championships in Stuttgart, you competed in the all-around for the first time in years. Are you now training only one event again?
A: Yes. I had to restore the all-around in order to qualify to the Tokyo Olympics. I thought that training only vault would have been risky. Any accidental mistake and you lose all your chances. I can say honestly, it’s a bit hard for me to compete in the all-around now. That’s why for the World Championships, we built the routines just sufficient enough to get a certain sum of points and qualify to the Olympics.
Q: Before the 2016 Olympics, you told me that you were dreaming of winning an Olympic medal for Uzbekistan. You didn’t manage to do it in Rio. What do you want now?
A: The goal of getting onto the medal podium is still there. I’m working on vault very seriously. My difficulty is no different from the vault difficulty of the girls who competed in the vault final at the World Championships in Stuttgart and are competing now. So, I think that it’s quite possible to fight for a medal. It’s hard to move forward without a goal. Although I never needed additional motivation. I just like what I do.
Q: But that wasn’t always the case, right? At what point in your career, working under constant pressure from the coaches and “I must do it” were replaced by “I want it”?
A: In 2002, when Alisher got sick and we moved to Germany. To this day, many still think that I didn’t have a choice but to keep training and earn money for the treatment that way, but it’s not true. The Germans told me right away – Oksana, if you can’t do it, no one will force you to. We’ll help you with your child’s treatment anyway. And they indeed helped and supported me in getting the citizenship, so that Alisher could be treated in Germany for free and I wouldn’t need to think about raising funds. The only goal I had going into the gym at the time was to keep my sanity while my son was at the hospital. That was when I realized how much fun training can be when you know you want to train and compete.
Q: Veteran elite athletes like to say that at some point, you start being aware of all your past injuries, including the most minor ones. Has that happened to you already?
A: No and it never will.
Q: How can you be so sure? As far as I remember, you had surgeries on both your shoulders and tore you Achilles twice…
A: I know my body very well. I know how to work and how to avoid problems. And injuries… If we’re talking about professional sports, you probably won’t find a completely healthy person there. It’s just that some people talk a lot about it and some don’t. That’s it. I think the key is in how correct was the recovery process and whether it was too fast. Obviously, after the retirement, I will have to stay quite active in any case and keep training but I don’t think anything bad will happen to me.
Q: Almost all athletes who I’ve talked to admitted they were terrified of retirement. Is this feeling familiar to you?
A: I guess I’m lucky – I have a great family, adult son, my husband, my pillar of support who will always help me with anything. In addition, I already know what I will do after the retirement. I’m training for the Olympics and at the same time starting to work on a completely different thing. So, I’m not afraid at all.
Q: By “a completely different thing” do you mean coaching?
A: No. I plan on opening my own sports club in Uzbekistan, I even got the land to build it already from the government.
Q: For Oksana Chusovitina’s private gymnastics school?
A: It’s not even about the sport. More like a healthy way of life. I want young people to come to the club, I want to have classes for kids from orphanages, from poor families. I know about a lot of cases when parents just can’t pay for sports classes. That’s why I want to try implementing this idea together with the government.
Q: Your colleagues working in private gyms in the US all say that in terms of money, it’s more more profitable to rely on recreational sports and not elite.
A: I will honestly say that I didn’t have a single thought to profit from this project, to earn some huge amount of money. Obviously, we will also have classes with tuition. After all, the club needs money to exist. At the moment, I am strongly supported by the government, by our Olympic Committee. I know that I can turn to them with any problem and they will always help me.
Q: Did you watch the latest European Championships?
A: Yes, of course, with immense pleasure. After all, we haven’t competed in a very long time. And you know what I’ll say – the Russian team can easily compete with the USA for the first place in the team competition in Tokyo.
Q: What do you think of the talks that the leader of the US team Simone Biles takes strong drugs that help her compete under the pretense of therapeutic use exemptions?
A: I don’t know that so I can’t say anything about it.
Q: But do you share the opinion that Biles competes on beam more reliably and confidently than any other gymnast before her?
A: I guess everything quickly becomes forgotten. Find and watch videos of beam routines of Tatiana Gutsu, Olesia Dudnik, Svetlana Boginskaya. They were all just as good. And I can tell you for sure that we didn’t take anything. We just worked a lot. Regarding Biles, I saw her train. She spends eight hours a day in the gym. She works as hard on the events as we used to work on the USSR team. After that, I definitely wouldn’t say that Simone is winning unfairly.
Q: How many hours a day do you train?
A: Two. But I’m a different story. I rely a lot on what I accumulated during the Soviet times. People like to talk now that during Alexander Alexandrov’s times, when he worked with out women’s team, everything was too hard. Yes, it was hard because he demanded results from us. And I’m really grateful to Alexandrov for the foundation he gave to me. I think that we never should forget the coaches who did so much good for us.
Q: In almost 30 years of your Olympic career you practically became an icon in your sport and achieved incredible fame. How is it to live when almost anyone can invade your privacy?
A: Both journalists and regular people behave properly in Uzbekistan. In addition, there’s a long-established system for the media relations – all interviews have to be scheduled in advance through the Olympic Committee. This year, I warned everyone in advance that I won’t be giving any interviews in the last months before the Olympics. I want to prepare for the Games in peace. All the talking will be after that.
Q: Does the fact that you’re not only an athlete but also an athlete representative for the FIG gives you more work?
A: Not really. We take part in discussing the new rules and some specific issues. Among the latest ones – the issue of female gymnasts wearing unitards instead of regular leotards. Like the ones Germans wore at the European Championships.
Q: It seems to me that it’s mostly those who have extra weight that tend to cover their whole body. In that case, all young women want to cover themselves in black from head to toes.
A: Well, I guess. In my opinion, everything about this topic is just ridiculous. Oh, a photographer took a picture of me in a split! But you were being photographed in splits for twenty years before that – that was fine, then? I don’t understand this topic. And I’ll never wear a unitard. I have a great body and I’m not ashamed of it. And competing in a unitard is just not comfortable. Not to mention the fact that all this hype seems weird – no one is banning unitards in our sport and no one ever banned them before! Read the rules – everything was spelled out there a long time ago.
Q: How is your long-time hobby – riding horses – going?
A: I don’t have time for it once again. Although I rode horses regularly during the lockdown. My husband even started encouraging me – you’ll retire from gymnastics and need to switch to riding right away.
Q: Perhaps, you should think about it?
A: I first need to prepare for the Games, compete in Tokyo, and only then start thinking about something else.
Q: After the retirement, do you plan on doing administrative work or becoming a coach?
A: We’ll see how things will be. The only thing I can say for sure, after the Olympics, I want to gather my family and go on vacation, the three of us. This is my first task. In this sense, I even saw the pandemic and the lockdown as a blessing. I’ve never spent as much time at home before. I tried everything. I learned how to cook, how to ride a bike.
Q: What do you mean, [ride a bike]?
A: What I said. When I was a child, this was too much of a luxury, my parents couldn’t afford it, so I just fulfilled my childhood dream. I rode my bike around the city and saw, for the first time, how beautiful Tashkent is in the spring. At home, I felt like a real wife. I took care of my husband. This, turns out, brings such pleasure… My husband even suggested once, “Maybe, to hell with the Olympics?”
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