#Tatiana Lysenko

[sonyaheaneyauthor]

Ukrainian gymnast Tatiana Lysenko, 1992 Olympic Balance Beam Champion.

When Ukraine Ruled Gymnastics

[freifraufischer]

The geopolitics that left two of Ukraine’s best gymnasts out of the Olympics...

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was very awkward in it’s timing from a sporting point of view.  Most spots for the 1992 Olympic Games were gained by USSR teams competing in that year but by the next the country didn’t exist.  It was decided to allow the former Soviet Republics (other than the Baltic States that had become independent earlier) to compete as the Unified Team under the Olympic banner for team events with their individual country’s flag and anthems for individual events.

This makes one of the traditional debates about the 1992 Olympics a bit complicated one Tatiana Gutsu fell in her optional beam exercise and Rosa Galieva finished ahead of her.  In any year previous there would be no question that a Soviet coach could decide substitute a gymnast with perceived greater medal potential.  It had happened in 1985 at the world championships and 1990 at the Goodwill Games.  But when the AA was an individual competition was it right that a Russian coach could pull an Uzbek gymnast in favor of a Ukrainian?  Mostly this is a debate only American gymnastics fans care about because of it’s implications for the Gutsu vs Miller all around battle.

But it does highlight just how complicated the Unified Team was as an organization.  One might say that they simply behaved like it was a USSR team ... but let me show you how they didn’t from the very beginning.

Let’s start with the 1992 European Championships which was the first gymnastics meet where these gymnasts competed under their own flags and which happened before the 1992 Olympic Games.  Here are the results from the AA with the non-former Soviet countries removed.

1 Tatiana Gutsu UKR 39.725 4 Tatiana Lysenko UKR 39.137 5 Svetlana Boginskaya BLR 39.136 6 Ludmilla Stovbchataya UKR 39.061 10 Elena Grudneva RUS 38.849

4 of these 5 gymnasts would be on the 6 person 1992 Unified Team.  Their names are bolded.

It should be noted that a number of relevant gymnasts couldn’t compete in 1992 Euros because their new countries were in Asia so this excludes Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan athletes who will be relevant to this conversation later.

Now let’s look at the 1992 CIS Championships.  The CIS was the temporary successor organization to the USSR for this transition.  I have added their country listing at the time.

1 Tatiana Lysenko 39.725 - UKR 2 Roza Galiyeva 39.412 - UZB 3 Oksana Chusovitina 39.099 - UZB 4 Svetlana Boginskaya 38.950 - BLR 5 Natalia Kalinina 38.862 - UKR 6 Tatiana Gutsu 38.825 - UKR 7 Anna Zaitseva 38.687 - KAZ 7 Ludmilla Stovbchataya 38.687 - UKR 9 Svetlana Kozlova 38.487 - RUS 10 Elena Grudneva 38.450 - RUS

I have bolded the members of the Unified Team.  Gutsu won 3 of the CIS Championships event finals on vault, bars, and beam.  Stovbchataya won the event final on floor.

During the USSR period it was entirely possible for the team selectors to creat a team with no Russian gymnasts.  They had in 1989 at the World Championships where the team had been made up of 2 Ukrainians, 2 Latvians and 2 Belarussians.  But they did not pick the Unified Team blind to country of origin.  There had to be a Russian on the team and so they skipped over two Ukrainians who had better results (and a Kazak) in order to put Elena Grudneva on the 1992 Olympic team.

I suspect that if Ukraine had been allowed to compete as it’s own country in 1992 they could have won the gold outright.

Natalia Kalinina was one of the greatest gymnasts never to make an Olympic Team.  She was a member of the 1991 USSR World Championship team that had won gold and had beaten Boginskaya in 1990 to take the 1990 Goodwill Games AA.  The above video is from that performance.  She was a stunning classical floor worker.  She continued to compete for Ukraine for a few years after being snubbed from the 1992 selection.

This is Ludmilla Stovbchataya’s 1992 European Championships EF Beam.

She won the bronze behind Gutsu and Boginskaya.

Stovbchataya would continue to complete for Ukraine as well for a few years past the 1992 Olympics.  

[lesser-known-composers]

Mykola Lysenko - Valse Brillante op.6

Tatiana Prima khoury ( Piano)

[gymnasticscoaching]

Tatiana Lysenko - 1991 Beam

Tatiana Lysenko – 1991 Beam

Indianapolis Worlds. One of the greatest Soviet gymnasts of the greatest era, Tatiana was 1992 Olympic champion on Beam. Lysenko was born in Kherson, Ukraine and has a Ukrainian-Jewish background. You know her home town because Putin invade it — and was later pushed out. Tatiana lives in California today. Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

[gym-oldies]

[mo-salto]

It’s always the right time for Tatiana Lysenko appreciation

[gymfanconfessions]

“ tatiana lysenko queen of the beam tbh “

[dear-aliya-count-me-in]

quaRoutines (17/?)

included simply for her statement on her decision to throw a dty:

- During vault finals, you did a double-twisting Yurchenko and took a step. At the time, a single-twisting Yurchenko and a double were both valued out of a 10. Do you ever look back and regret not using the simpler vault?

- No, I’m so glad I did it. I would have felt so much worse if I did just a full and still took a step. I would have thought, “How silly was that?” No matter how safe you play it, there’s never a guarantee that you will not make a mistake. And taking risks like that was part of our team philosophy: the idea that if you could do something, you should do it—you should show it to the world. It wasn’t about playing a game of points or determining how to use the Code to your advantage. It was about showing the best gymnastics that you could in a pure sense.

[cristinabontas]

yeet

[illyria-and-her-pet]

Tatiana Lysenko’s 3 LOSO mount and full in dismount @ 1992 CIS Championships

[1122deactivated2211]

The medal podium for vault at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics:

Lavinia Miloșovici (Romania) and Henrietta Ónodi (Hungary) - tied for gold. Tatiana Lysenko (Ukraine) - bronze.

All three gymnasts went home with at least one gold medal from the Games.

[freifraufischer]

Many viewers will probably look and say but she's a hefty girl.  But no no, she's a very very shapely young lady.  It's really difficult to judge the size of these gymnasts on television because somebody like Shannon Miller is so diminutive.  But Natalia Yurchenko is is a very normal, shapely young lady.  Probably only about 5'1" tall and in a size 8 jeans so she's quite slender.  Just makes us dread to think what we'd all look like in leotards.

Monica Phelps, professional gymnastics commentator at the 1994 World Championships about Tatiana Lysenko (not Natalia Yurchenko who didn’t even compete in the same decade).

[tchaikovskaya]

saw some tweet talking about "lysenko apologism" and i didnt see who tweeted it and i thought it was about soviet unified team gymnast tatiana lysenko's controversial olympic gold medal from barcelona 1992 and i was MIFFED and then i realized it was about trofim lysenko... 🙄 ANYWAY back to more IMPORTANT matters

[pargolettasworld]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYWJuDkwevU

It’s probably not too much of a revelation that Aly Raisman’s 2012 floor music was “Hava Nagila.”  She’s hardly the first gymnast to use it -- it’s a lively, upbeat melody, it’ll get the crowd clapping along, most people know it, it’s easy to arrange within the 90-second time limit for the floor exercise, and there’s an A section and a B section, so you can have a tempo change -- I believe the Code of Points does want a tempo change at some point.

But what’s really lovely here is to see an openly Jewish gymnast performing to one of the most recognizably Jewish melodies in the world.  It’s not that there haven’t been other Jewish gymnasts, or even other Jewish gymnasts at the Olympics, or even other Jewish gymnasts on American Olympic teams (Kerri Strug is now probably the second most famous American Jewish gymnast, for instance).  But it wasn’t something that you’d make a big deal out of, and I wouldn’t be surprised if, for instance, the Soviet Union actively tried to suppress any mention that, say Yelena Shushunova or Tatiana Lysenko were MOTs.

It can be a little bit tricky for Jewish gymnasts to climb the ranks into elite, just because the training takes so much time, and so many gymnastics meets are on Saturdays -- there’s a kid at my shul who’s a gymnast, and loves it, and is always conflicted about whether to go to meets or go to shul.  So it was really a treat to see a Jewish gymnast out there on the world stage, openly being Jewish and celebrating it with her floor music and her dance!

(I get that part of the requirement for a floor exercise is to “portray a character” and to have some kind of recognizable actual dancing in addition to the acrobatic and “dance” elements, but honestly, I’ve only rarely seen anything in any gymnast’s floor routine that I would describe as a “character.”  Aly Raisman does this about as well as most, and certainly well enough for this music.)

[vaultscoring]

Newbie gym fan here.. what's with the txj and tatiana gutsu comparisons? Was tatiana in a similar position?

In the 1992 Olympics, Tatiana Gutsu was one of the strongest gymnasts of the Unified Team (the Soviet team in all but name since USSR was no more). However, since she is Ukrainian, she fell on beam in QF optionals because it's just in her DNA, and put herself out of the AA, placing behind queen of the world Svetlana Boguinskaya, Tatiana Lysenko, and fellow rookie Roza Galieva.

Back then, they couldn't withdraw a gymnast from a final other than because of an injury, but they knew Gutsu was better than Galieva, so they bold faced pretended Galieva had an injury and withdrew her anyway lol. Gutsu had a great day in the AA final and won, which caused a lot of controversy later when Galieva was Not Happy about it. They later allowed countries to withdraw gymnasts from finals for non-injury reasons specifically because of this I think.

TXJ was similarly in the AA final after fucking up beam in QF and someone else being withdrawn (though not a rookie this time) and then had a great day! We love Tangutsu Xijing!

[mo-salto]

Tag yourself: “Bye I’m dead now” FX ending poses edition

Clockwise from top left: Svetlana Khorkina (RUS), Lieke Wevers (NED), Oréane Lechenault (FRA), Vasiliki Millousi (GRE), Stella Umeh (CAN), Tatiana Lysenko (URS)