Svetlana Baitova: Victory is more difficult to survive than defeat

Svetlana Baitova who won team gold at the 1988 Olympics recently talked to Igor Kozlov of Sputnik.by about her career and about life after retiring from competitive sports.

Q: Svetlana, this year marks 30 years since you became an Olympic champion. In light of your experience, if you could go back in time, would you decide to do gymnastics again?

A: You asked me this question and said it would be the central one when we agreed to do this interview. Honestly, it made me think. I don’t have a single answer. I can say both yes and now and both of those things will be true. I can’t judge and compare times. It wasn’t just a different time, it was another era. Who could boast then that at the age of 12 they traveled around the world? In the USSR, besides the highest ranked diplomats, only athletes could have such an opportunity. My parents, just as everyone else, looked at the world as we then said “through the eyes of Senkevich” by watching his “Traveler’s Club”*. I traveled abroad for the first time in 1984. It was Poland. I was 12 years old, it was so amazing. Bright bows, hair clips, t-shirts! I was a princess not just at my school, but in the whole city. At the time we all lived in black and white, let’s tell the truth. I was proud of that [new look], people envied me, they paid attention to me. For me it was also a kind of a victory: I had what others could only dream of. And how much I had to work for that? This was a secret for everyone, I didn’t let it show, how hard it was. Could you judge a kid for such selfishness and lack of hindsight? I don’t think so. And then competition follows another competition, the success comes to which you get used right away. And there were no doubts that the right path was chosen. Moreover, at the time I thought I was unbelievably lucky that I started doing artistic gymnastics.

Q: This is the answer from the “yes” category. And what can you say about “no”?

A: “No” is when the times after your retirement comes and you start realizing that everything in life has to be paid for. This realization isn’t theoretical, it’s not on the level of talks. It was quite tangible: there was no money, no health, the job was in question but the whole life is ahead and it’s all completely unknown. The elite sport doesn’t let you go, you can enter it and you can never leave it. This is both great happiness and a great sacrifice. When your peers are in school and then in college, when they create their life space step by step, you’re doing only one thing – sport. You’re leaving everything else “for later”. But this is the case when it’s not possible to leave things “for later”, everything should be done in time.

Q: And how did you go to school?

A: After the fourth grade, I was at a special sports class and after the eighth grade I was transferred to the Olympic reserve school. We had three practices a day, the teachers came to us between 8 pm and 10 pm and tutored us wherever we were at camps.

Q: But this could hardly be called proper education.

A: And I’m not calling it that. I can’t compare my schooling and that of my peers at the time. After each practice, it was necessary to rest, to eat, to relax, to prepare for the next practice. Artistic gymnastics isn’t a sentimental sport, it’s not long-distance running when sometimes you can relax and then catch up. There has to be full concentration on your routine not just at competitions but at practices, too. Our sport is very injury-prone, there’s a lethal risk sometimes. The example of Elena Mukhina is tragic, when a person relaxed her muscles one time and became a cripple.

Q: Do you often dream about gymnastics?

A: I used to, but I rarely do now. I’ve never dreamed about my favorite bars, only about my hated vault. And I dreamed that I don’t manage to run to the vaulting table. I wasn’t very good at tumbling, my best events were bars and beam.

Q: Do you often get disappointed by people? What do you think was the cause of the unfair treatment towards you? Is it possible to get used to and how this should be treated?

A: Imagine a situation. You’re 16 years old but you’re already an Olympic champion. You are interviewed, your photo is on the magazine covers and first pages of newspapers. Everyone’s smiling at you, praising you, being delighted with you. You earn your first good money, you become the family’s breadwinner. And then all this disappears at once, you start looking for the reason, you start getting angry at the whole world, you break down. Only your loved ones stay with you but even they can’t understand you completely because you experienced something they don’t know or understand. Times passes and you begin to realize that something like this happens to everyone, the success is not forever, you’re nothing but an object of their work for sports officials and journalists. The fame that delighted you now starts being a burden. You don’t have the right to make mistakes, any wrong step immediately becomes a topic of discussions. I could feel on my back the staring of the people who used to praise me in my face and then said behind my back: “Well, how is our star doing now?”

Q: A question I have to ask: how much money were you paid for your Olympic gold in 1988?

A: I received 8,000 rubles and an apartment. It was a decent amount for that time, you could buy the most coveted car of the time – Lada Sputnik.

Q: Does winning an Olympic gold change the relationship between the coach and the athlete or does everything stay the same?

A: Everything changes right away. If someone tell you it doesn’t, don’t believe them. Or at least that’s how it is in our sport. Victory is more difficult to survive than defeat. There are many factors here – fame, interest from journalists, money. In my case, I became sort of a hostage of my coach. In Sveta Boginskaya’s case, her coach, Liubov Miromanova became a hostage of her star pupil.

Q: And what happened with Liubov Miromanova?

A: I don’t want to discuss this, I only know what everyone knows – she’s not with us anymore. Imagine a situation that you’re flying on the same plane with the person, play checkers with her (this was on our plane from Seoul), and three days later you’re told that Miromanova isn’t no longer with us. Boginskaya was a brilliant gymnast, we were friends at one point, we were roommates, but her character! I often felt sorry for Miromanova.

Q: In 1986, at the age of 14, you became the all-around USSR champion and a year later you won gold on beam and vault at nationals. You came to Seoul as one of the favorites. What were you lacking in order to become the all-around Olympic champion?

A: Sports luck never favored me. I competed in Seoul with a serious injury, I had a broken wrist. On the team, I was the “bar setter”, that is, I competed first. It’s a mentally difficult task when you compete in team competitions. The one who competes first must not fall, so that the whole team wouldn’t “slide off”, she has to set the tone for the whole team and to break the rivals. But the first competitor is in effect sacrificed because she doesn’t get high scores. On that national team, any single one of us could win the all-around. And the same was the case with the men’s team. I think that those were the strongest USSR teams in the history. This was true not just in Seoul but also in Barcelona in 1992.

Q: In our conversation, we cannot avoid talking about the sex scandals in artistic gymnastics. What do you think about Tatiana Gutsu, the all-around Olympic champion accusing Vitaly Scherbo, also the all-around Olympics champion from the same Olympics, of raping her at Worlds in the US in 1991?**

A: You know, this lies in the area of “I believe-I don’t believe”. Personally, I don’t believe it. Vitaly Scherbo stood out on that star team. His talent was always accompanied by success and luck. He had crowds of female fans, there was no need for him to rape anyone, and especially Gutsu. She just has too high self-esteem. On the national team, the choreographers always treated her like she was a God’s gift, choreographing her movements, her neck and everything else. If you remember, the Barcelona Olympics were special because the Unified team competed there. Everyone was sort of together at the time but everyone understood that we were all apart already. At the Olympics, the team selection process included many factors not related to the sport. I have a complex and ambiguous attitude towards Svetlana Boginskaya but at that Olympics, she should’ve been the all-around champion.

Q: And what did you think about the Russian tv show “Let them talk” where Olga Korbut accused her coach Renald Knysh of raping her 46 years ago?

A: I can’t give judgments about people I don’t know personally. I was born in the year of Olga Korbut’s triumph in Munich. I, like other gymnasts, had success, while Korbut had triumph. That’s why I’m trying to be diplomatic in my statements. I don’t know Renald Knysh, I only heard that he’s a genius coach but a very difficult person. My coach who unfortunately passed away already, Oleg Grigoryevich Michshenko was also an innovator. In addition to flares on beam and floor, I had a unique connection on bars – Burda circle on high bar into a Burda circle on the low bar. I never showed it in competition, so that’s why it’s not named after me. But my coach was. I read somewhere that German Titov, the second astronaut after Yuri Gagarin, was very upset that he wasn’t the first. Everyone tried to calm him down but he replied: “Columbus was the first to discover America, but can you name the person who was the second?” We know two kinds of gymnastics – before Korbut and Knysh and after. These fame and triumph belong to both of them but, as I said before, it’s something that cannot be divided. There was a sense of shame left after that tv show. Same as with many other shows on tv. Sometimes I feel like the screens keep showing “The Lower Depths” play by Gorkiy in different variations. I heard from many people that if Liudmila Tourishcheva ended up in Korbut’s place with Knysh, she would keep shining in gymnastics throughout the whole 70s and the legendary Romanian Nadia Komaneci would be left watching her from the sidelines.

Q: Based on your experience, have people in general disappointed you?

A: No. There were all sorts of situations in my life, there were moments of despair, but there was always someone who came to my rescue. I’m sincerely grateful to Antonina Vladimirovna Koshel, an Olympic champion in gymnastics in Munich, for the perseverance she showed getting me a sports pension. It’s not an old-age pension, I’m still far away from that. Everyone knew that I had twice the number of years on the national team required for this pension but when the archives were moved, some of the documents got lost. Many sighed, expressed sympathy, asked “to come tomorrow”, but only Antonina Vladimirovna solved this problem.

Q: Which gymnast you like or relate to?

A: There are many. But I relate more naturally to Svetlana Khorkina. Not just because we have the same name. In her, I saw and understood what I was lacking in my athletic career – competitive anger and bitchiness. You can’t survive without those in elite sports.

Q: What is the difference between how Olympic champions were treated during Soviet times and today in our country?

A: There were many Olympics champions in the USSR. And we were Olympic champions from the Belorussian Soviet Republic and not from the state of Belarus. This is a fundamental difference. Nowadays, I see that the government realizes the importance of sports, the risk and the sacrifices and person takes when they dedicate themselves to elite sport. But I’d like for those who competed in the past, in a different era, in the country that doesn’t exist anymore, not to be forgotten either. I sincerely envy the Russian Olympic championsh who have the life-long pension and I envy the events organized to honor them in Russia. I don’t complain about my life, I’m not forgotten, there’s an artistic gymnastics competition named after me in Mogilyov. But, I’ll be honest, I’d would like a little more and not even for myself.

*Travelers’ Club was an extremely popular TV show about other countries on the Soviet television. For most people, this was the only way to actually see a glimpse of actual life in the foreign countries. 

**The interviewer here got his facts wrong, Tatiana Gutsu alleges that the rape happened in Germany, at the DTB Cup.

 

Photo: Sputnik

 

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