Elena Shushunova on her career and competing at the 1988 Olympics

This is an old interview with Elena Shushunova by Vladimir Vashevnik. The translation was requested by Mara Lynch who is a patron of our website on Patreon. If you become a $5+ patron, you will also be able to place translation requests for the interviews with your favorite gymnasts.

The interview was published in July 2008 in MK-SPb and the original is not available on the web anymore, that’s why there is no link to the source, it was pulled up from an archive.

Sorry for the racist bit in the interview, I wish it didn’t have that question, but it’s a pretty common rhetoric out there.

 

Q: Elena Lvovna, did anyone in your family have anything to do with sports?

A: My parents never did sports any seriously, only gym classes at school.

Q: So, how did you get into organized sports?

A: At the time, coaches went to schools to look at the children. Once they came to my class. That’s how I ended up in gymnastics. My first coach was Galina Mikhaylovna Rubtsova. She was in charge of recruiting children and at the end of her career, she was training children again as well. Eventually, as our skills level grew, we had a group of six gymnasts and a team of coaches working with us. In our group, besides me, four people became International Master of Sports, three people were on the senior national team and two on the junior national team.

Q: Do you remember the first victories and the first losses that happened before you made the USSR’s national team?

A: It’s hard to remember this now. I can only say that I didn’t like losing since I was a child.

Q: You’re talking about liking – what was your favorite apparatus, then?

A: With my professional progress, the favorite apparatuses were changing. At first, I was best on floor and vault, then I started liking bars.

Q: And what about the beam – do all gymnasts dislike it so much?

A: No, not all, but it’s a pretty risky apparatus, even though all apparatuses have certain elements of risk. At one time I liked working on the beam. You can fly off the bars as well or miss on the vault, and on floor, too, there’s a high possibility for errors.

Q: What can you remember about your competitors?

A: There were always plenty of competitors. There’s a lot of competition in our country. In order to make the national team, we had to go through such a “sift”.

Q: What was motivating you in training and competitions?

A: Well, people aren’t made of steel. When I was around 10 or 11 I wanted to stop training. My mom was pleading with me, she said that everything started working out for me. Then, around 16, the coaches told me that I can’t give up everything after so many years of work. Then, when I won at the European Championships and the World Cup, the national team composition started changing – Natasha Yurchenko left. So it happened that I had to become the team captain. Then, in 1987, when we lost the Worlds to Romania, there was a thought: “How did this happen?” Although it was very hard for us right before the Olympic Games, the team was almost completely new. We were working a lot.

Q: In your opinion, which of your national teams was the strongest?

A: I shouldn’t guess, but I think that if we competed at the 1984 Olympic Games, we would win. In 1985, we also had a very strong team. No one had a right to mistakes.

Q: What were your thoughts before the 1988 Games?

A: What thoughts – just to win! After all, before that there weren’t proper Olympic Games for 8 years – either the Americans boycotted or we boycotted. The athletes only suffered from that. At these Games, we had to win: do it or die. Especially in the team final, but we were finishing the fight basically just the five of us. The team had six people, five scores counted and no one could make a mistake because Olga Strazheva twisted her ankle on beam. Her score didn’t count on beam and on floor, just five people competed while the gap was only 0.5… If someone fell it would be the end.

Q: Have you thought about simplifying your routine somehow so that there would be less risk?

A: If you start changing your routine because there are fewer people on the team, you’ll definitely fall. So, no one changed anything.

Q: Your sport is quite subjective – the result can’t be measured with a tape.

A: Yes, it does not fit the “Faster, higher, stronger” slogan.

Q: After all, a lot in your sport depends on the judges.

A: Well, first of all, there is a whole team of judges and every judge is being assessed, there are also observers from the international federation. But in sports, like in life, anything can happen. Once, at the USSR championships in Chelyabinsk, I competed very well on the beam. The judges gave me either 9.6 or 9.7. Immediately, there’s a call to the head judge from the main judging panel: “What have you done? Shushunova can’t get scores like that!” They took three-tenths from my score even though according to the competition rules, a score can’t be lowered by more than 0.2 points. So, there’s that.

Q: Were Romanians your main competitors?

A: There were many competitors – East Germany, Romania, China, USA. You can’t discount anyone. Of course, the main fight at the Games was against the Romanians.

Q: Were there any other unpleasant surprises after your team ended up counting just five people?

A: Someone else breaking a leg? No, thank God, nothing else happened.

Q: The famous volleyball coach Nikolai Karpol often delivered his thoughts to the athletes during the critical moments of the game, using not such a fine language. Did that ever happen on your team?

A: No, obscene language wasn’t used on our team. Our coach, Rodionenko, as a highly cultured person, completely excluded such expressions from his own vocabulary and ours.

Q: What can you say about modern gymnastics? In your time, it was just all-around but nowadays a person can prepare a routine on just one apparatus and become a world champion.

A: But not in all-around.  Still, in gymnastics, winning the all-around and the team competition is the most prestigious. If the current rules existed now, it would probably be possible to compete for another ten years.

Q: Especially, if a person had a “pet” apparatus, like Gienger or Delchev on high bar. You just train a routine on your favorite apparatus without being distracted by other events.

A: Of course, but, on the other hand, the technique is the same on different events. That’s why you need to train other events as well. Perhaps, just without paying so much attention to them. Besides, there are no compulsories now. We had to spent so much time training both compulsory and optional routines.

Q: What do you think about the appearance of other countries in gymnastics, which were not noticeable in your time, but now their representatives pick up medals here and there?

A: There’s nothing to be surprised about – the whole competition field is Russian-speaking. Our whole school moved abroad.

Q: Is that why Liukin’s daughter is among the winners?

A: Of course. The famous Olympic champion has the strongest school in the US and his daughter is currently the strongest US gymnast. Her bars routine is something else. I saw the video. I think there will be surprises by the time of the Olympic Games.

Q: Did your sport become more difficult?

A: First of all, the apparatuses change. You can’t discount that. Larisa Latynina performed simple elements, compared to our days, but it was on a carpet that was put directly onto the floor. Now the gymnastics floor is a four-layer sandwich. And what about the new vaulting table!

Q: When you started doing gymnastics, did you have an athletic idol?

A: This question is asked all the time.

Q: Of course, it’s a standard question. Well, perhaps, an idol is too strong a word, but maybe you liked a certain gymnast, wanted to borrow some of her elements?

A: Honestly, I never wanted to borrow anything, but when Mostepanova competed, I was thinking:  “Wow, what a body for gymnastics she has! Well, I don’t have that, so I’ll need to find a way to win”. Then I looked up to Natasha Yurchenko, to how she trained. For me, she was the perfect team captain. But you can’t be like someone else, you have to be yourself. One person has one talent, another has another. I always envied Boginskaya. Simply speaking, she did something three times and it worked out, while someone else needed to repeat it thirty-three times. That’s talent. One needs three, another one – thirty-three.

Q: Do you keep in touch with your friends-competitors?

A: I know that Mary Lou Retton – the 1984 Olympic champion – earned a lot of money from advertisement contracts. A lot of our athletes moved to different countries – Yurchenko is in the US, Tanya Frolova is in Canada, Ksyusha Omelyanchik is in her native Kiev, Lena Shevchenko is in Moscow, Sveta Baitova is in Belarus. After all, it was the Soviet Union’s team. I think Natasha Ilyenko is in England. Everyone’s scattered all over.

Q: If we come back to our city, what do you think of gymnastics in the city which was in the past represented by Pelageya Danilova, Liudmila Egorova, Tamara Manina, Vladimir Portnoy, Natalia Kuchinskaya, Aleksandr Dityatin, Elena Davydova and by, Elena Shushunova? It used to be that the coaches could lose their jobs for placing second, but now a third place is considered a success.

A: Let’s count – 15 republics or just one. From whom to choose? Our reserve bench was almost as good as the main team, but it’s not like that anymore.

Q: Is it hard for you, with your victories, to hear about the current “huge” plans – to win any medal?

A: I’ll say it again – the whole international competition speaks Russian. Our whole school moved abroad. Any team has our specialists as either coaches or consultants.

Q: Are Chinese as predisposed to gymnastics as Black people – to basketball, boxing, and track?

A: Absolutely. In my time, we were told that the Chinese don’t tumble – either on floor or on vault. But they had amazing routines on beam. Their men were tumbling back then as well, Li Ning was quite a tumbler and now they’re tumbling just fine. I think that we’ll need to watch out for them in Beijing. And others should too.

Q: When you watch the competition, can you give any advice to a gymnast or her coach?

A: Absolutely not. First, I have no ethical right to advise – people who work together for a long time see the nuances of the situation much better from within. I can give some advice if they ask me for it. Second, the security doesn’t allow anyone near the athletes and the coaches.

Q: Will you make predictions for the upcoming Games?

A: Oh, it’s a thankless job – you just have to watch the Games.

Q: So, you don’t have any predictions?

A: In order to have predictions, you need to know the teams’ level of preparation.

Q: But you still probably try to estimate out who’s at what level?

A: I can’t estimate because I haven’t seen anyone yet. I can assume that we’ll see a successful performance from Italians, Romanians, Americans, Chinese. I can’t say anything about Ukraine. Even the British can make some event finals. Nowadays, representatives of many countries can do great on a specific day and win a medal. Regarding the all-around, I think that if we make the top-three, it will be very good. I mean the team final. It seems so to me. But this so-called “prediction” is just a guess.

Q: So, any little thing can affect the final result?

A: Of course. Especially, since the new rules contribute to it – I won’t bore you with the details, but it brings certain nuances to the scores.

Q: Is there still no limit to the improvement of the individual elements?

A: There’s no limit to perfection and the difficulty of the elements largely depends on the quality of the apparatuses. In my time, the bars were set apart no wider than the distance from shoulders to hips. Then the width was increased to, say, 1.4 meters. Then it was allowed to set them even wider. Now the bars can be set 1.7 meters apart – you can swing between them with almost a straight body. The bars were set wider and the new elements with a different quality arrived – the execution score is getting higher. There’s no 10 points limit nowadays, so there’s no need to worry about the stagnation of the results like in track where the world records are standing for many years and in order to improve them you’d likely need to take into account thousandths of a second in running and millimeters in jumping.

Q: The bars broke after Liudmila Tourischeva’s performance, the same happened to Yuri Titov during his performance on high bar. Has something like this ever happened to you?

A: Fortunately, no, but I’ve seen how bars broke down. By the way, about bars: in my time they were oval shape but now they’re round. The development of sports doesn’t stop and this is their charm. Earlier, track and field were dominated by the athletes from USSR and USA, the same was in weightlifting, then the weightlifters from Bulgaria made a name for themselves. In hockey, our athletes and Canadians used to win. In cross-country skiing – our athletes and Scandinavians, in pentathlon – our athletes and Hungarians, in basketball – our athletes, Americans, and Yugoslavs, in swimming – Americans and Australians, in artistic gymnastics  – our athletes and Japanese. We used to have almost a monopoly in chess but now the number of competitors at the highest level of competitions has increased immeasurably. So it necessary to get used to new realities, to be able to foresee the tendencies of the development of one or another sport so that the rivals can’t take us by surprises so that their new developments won’t become an unpleasant surprise for our athletes. As for the upcoming Olympic Games in Beijing, I want to hope for a successful performance of the Russian delegation – it wasn’t easy for the previous generations of athletes either but they won. I hope for the continuation of the victorious traditions.