Olga Korbut | Encyclopedia.com (2024)

1955-

Belarussian gymnast

Olga Korbut brought qualities to Olympic gymnastics that few had seen before. She brought innovation—her backwards flips from the balance beam and the uneven bars became a staple of the sport's repertoire. She brought youth—Korbut and her American peer Cathy Rigby were the standard-bearers of gymnastics' new breed of teenage prodigies. And she brought a smile—Korbut freely expressed the joy and pain behind her craft, countering the image of Soviet athletes as stoic and inaccessible. As Sports Illustrated writer Leigh Montville put it, "she was 85 pounds of pigtailed détente, flipping her way into the American consciousness."

Talent Shows Early

Korbut was born in 1955 (some sources say 1956) in Grodno, on the Niemen River in the country of Belarussia, then part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.). Now called Belarus, the nation was a training ground for the Soviet gymnastics system, which had produced such stars as Yelena Volchetskaya, Larissa

Petrik, and Tamara Lazakovich. The youngest daughter of an engineer and a cook, Korbut was small for her age. But "she more than made up for it, in the opinion of her physical education instructor," noted Soviet Life reporter Vladimir Golubev in 1973. "Olga was good at exercises, [and] ran faster than the tall girls and many of the boys."

At age eleven the young girl qualified to enter the Soviet sports-school system (following her older sister, Ludmilla, also a master gymnast). The government-run program provides extracurricular athletic training to children who show high aptitude. Within a year Korbut was training under Renald Knysh, a top coach. It was Knysh who worked with his young charge to develop some of the groundbreaking moves that would amaze spectators years later. He recognized Korbut's strength and daring, and rehearsed her on the heretofore untried backward somersault on the balance beam. Korbut demonstrated the move at the U.S.S.R. championship meet, at which she placed fifth. Korbut's outstanding performance, however, was not without its critics, who said that her "tricks" were too dangerous to be emulated by any other gymnast.

A year after that, the rising gymnast took home a gold medal in the vault at a national meet and went on to attend her first international championship, where reserve-athlete Korbut gave a gymnastic demonstration that impressed a panel of referees. Adolescent angst caught up with Korbut briefly: "The praise went to her head, she began to put on airs, ignored her teammates and, in general, made herself objectionable," wrote Golubev. "But that was a passing phase." Injury and illness sidelined Korbut for several months, but she recovered in time to place third overall in the 1972 Soviet national championships, qualifying her for the Olympics that year.

In an interview posted on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) Web site, Korbut revealed that as early as age thirteen she felt ready to compete with world-class gymnasts. "I was ready for the [1968] Olympic Games," she said, "but I was fourteen years old, thirteen even and you couldn't compete [before age sixteen]." Korbut arrived in Munich as part of a team that included Ludmilla Turischeva, acknowledged to be the best female gymnast in the world; Tamara Kazakovich, and Antonina Koshel.

Raising the Bar in Gymnastics

The sight of the petite, pigtailed seventeen-year-old was duly noted by the audience, who were accustomed to not just more sober, but much older, Soviet gymnasts. (As recently as 1964, the gold medal winner from Russia was a 29-year-old mother.) In the past, gymnastics had been likened to a heightened form of ballet. By 1968, Cathy Rigby helped pioneer the athletic bent the sport would soon embrace; competing in her second summer games in 1972, Rigby was considered a favorite for an all-around gold medal. As the underdog, Korbut took the opportunity to show the judges her now-signature moves: the balance-beam backflip, and the Korbut Flip, a soaring backward leap from the higher to the lower section of the uneven parallel bars.

Nobody had seen anything like it. "I don't believe it!" exclaimed ABC commentator Gordon Maddux on seeing the four-foot-eleven gymnast fly around the bars. "Give her an 11!" Korbut's performance helped the Soviets secure the team gold medal. Her work on the balance beam and the floor exercise earned Korbut two additional golds in the all-around team competition. She set her sights on winning the uneven bars, but fate got in the way: During a maneuver, Korbut stubbed her toe and fell to the floor. As a worldwide audience watched, she dried her tears, rallied, and finished the routine. Later, she returned to the bars in the individual event and finished with a silver medal, bringing her Munich total to four.

In the eyes of Americans who harbored negative impressions of Soviet athletes, the sight of Korbut, smiling, waving, even crying when things went poorly, touched a common nerve. "Americans who didn't know a thing about gymnastics when the Munich Olympics began were arguing at the end whether or not Korbut deserved a perfect 10 for her work on the beam," wrote Montville. "Through television, the American public saw a fascinating, delicate creature, the little girl down the street, who seemed as removed as possible from the unemotional, cold Communist stereotype perpetuated by her teammates," Paul Attner stated in a Washington Post piece.

Indeed, the memory of Korbut's charm helped offset the trauma engendered by the worst terrorist attack ever to strike an Olympic games. On September 5, days after the women's gymnastic competition ended, a faction of the Palestinian Liberation Army known as Black September kidnapped and murdered the entire Israeli Olympic contingent: nine athletes and two coaches. The games stopped cold during the crisis, and controversy arose when it was decided to resume immediately afterward.

A Worldwide Favorite

For gymnastics' newest star, life would not be the same. She toured the United States and Europe, meeting everyone from the British Prime Minister to Mickey Mouse. In one notable encounter, Korbut met a stranger who greeted her by saying, "You're so tiny." "You're so big," she replied to President Richard Nixon. At the same time, Korbut felt the pressure of compliance with the Soviet government, who put the teenager into exhibition after exhibition to feed their financial coffers and to show the world, as she told the PBS interviewer, that the "former Soviet Union is the best." From 1972 to 1976, she added, "I wasn't at home. I was always being somewhere in different countries." She knew, as Korbut told same interviewer, that the Soviet secret service, the KGB, trailed her during those years.

"Athlete of the Year" honors came Korbut's way, and she continued to compete. In 1973 she was second allaround to Turischeva at the European Championships; she won the all-around title at the World University Games in Moscow. Over the next two years she continued to pursue Turischeva in national and international meets, but finished second all-around.

In 1976 Korbut again represented the Soviet Union at the Olympic summer games in Montreal, Quebec. Now twenty-one, Korbut saw firsthand the legacy of her Munich triumph in the form of young, bold, highly athletic competitors. Chief among them was Romania's Nadia Comaneci , who would go on to make history as Korbut had four years earlier. Plagued by uncharacteristic poor performance, Korbut won just one medal in the competition, a silver for the balance beam. Though her smile never faded, Korbut was eclipsed in the public eye by Comaneci, a fourteen-year-old phenom who posted gymnastics' first perfect "tens."

Athlete Turns Activist

Montreal represented Korbut's farewell to competition; she returned to the Soviet Union, married in 1978, and gave birth to her son, Richard, a year later. But the world had not heard the last of Olga Korbut. In 1986, the nuclear reactor in Chernobyl exploded. Some 180 miles away at her home in Minsk, Korbut could see the cloud of radiation. "But the government never even told us to stay indoors," she was quoted in a Sports Illustrated article by Hank Hersch. When some of her friends and relatives began falling ill, Korbut went into action. She became personally involved in Chernobyl relief projects, traveling to the U.S. to raise consciousness and money on behalf of the victims of radiation poisoning. Working with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Korbut helped collect $70,000 for medical supplies.

Chronology

Awards and Accomplishments

The United States became Korbut's adopted home. After sending her son, Richard, to live with friends New Jersey to keep him out of harm's way following Chernobyl, the former gymnast and her family settled in Atlanta. She established a new life and career—gymnastics coaching—but the damage had been done. Korbut revealed in 1991 that she was suffering from thyroid problems, which she attributed to radiation poisoning. Talking to People correspondent Bill Shaw, Korbut recalled the frightening atmosphere in the wake of a nuclear leak: "When people began hearing bits of

information, they felt panicky. They were afraid to drink the water, breathe the air, afraid of everything. We were all outdoors, because it was close to the [May Day] celebration, and we were planting gardens and enjoying the spring. If they had told us Chernobyl had exploded, we would have stayed inside and maybe avoided those early heavy doses of radiation." Cancer, she added, was rampant: "There are some people who were perfectly healthy and all of a sudden came down with severe illnesses we hadn't heard of." Worse, conditions in the impoverished region hampered treatment: "There are no machines for chemotherapy or drug therapy.… We can't find produce or meat or anything you need for a normal existence." As Korbut told Shaw, "I have never seen in my entire life such a lack of everything."

Subsequent to her move to the United States, Korbut faced challenging personal crises. In 1999 she went public with a claim that, as young as fifteen, the gymnast was coerced into sex by one of her coaches. The man told her to comply or risk being thrown off the Soviet team, she said. "Many of my teammates were forced to become sexual slaves … and I was one of them," she was quoted in a Moscow-based article printed in the Globe and Mail. Her marriage to Bortkevich broke up in 2000; she remarried a year later. But her image as a representative of her sport stayed with Korbut; during the 1996 Olympic summer games in Atlanta, she was an official attaché for Belarus.

Olga Korbut changed the face of gymnastics and made possible the goals of small girls to reach great heights in sport. She "flew across the screens as if she were drawn by a cartoonist's pen," Montville remarked. "No boundaries existed, no laws of nature.… She was pixie, elf, amazing Soviet sylph. Her smile was the definition of innocence. She made an entire world fall in love." But in her later years, the former teenage star spoke up for the older athlete. "I always thought there should be a separate classification for older gymnasts," she said to Montville in a 1989 Sports Illustrated article. "There should be different expectations for someone in a mature stage of womanhood than for a young girl. The audiences should not cheer only out of fear. There should be an appreciation of the beauty of gymnastics. That is what should be shown. A gymnast should be able to stay in the sport for a long time."

Where Is She Now?

Having survived the Communist regime and Chernobyl radiation, Olga Korbut moved to the United States to begin a new life. All would not go smoothly, however. In January 2002, Korbut was arrested, charged with shoplifting $19 worth of food from a Publix supermarket in Norcross, Georgia. The gymnast's representative, Kay Weatherford, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that it was a misunderstanding. Korbut, she explained, had mistakenly walked out of the store with the items to retrieve her wallet, left in the car. A more serious charge came shortly after that incident, when it was revealed that authorities had found $30,000 in counterfeit $100 bills in the Korbut home during eviction proceedings. The home had been most recently occupied by the athlete's grown son. The investigation was continued by the Secret Service.

Korbut's denied any involvement with this federal offense. Still, her attorney Howard Weintraub told Beth Warren in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "it must be absolutely devastating to have millions of people the world over now look at you in a light differently … for something you didn't do." In a 1992 Sports Illustrated piece, Korbut revealed a philosophy that may have well served her during these hard times. "I try not to focus on annoying things in my past," she said. "It's like the Russian proverb says: 'If I always watch who steps on my feet, I wouldn't walk.'"

CONTACT INFORMATION

Online: http://www.olgakorbut.com.

FURTHER INFORMATION

Books

Great Women in Sports. Detroit: Visible Ink Press, 1996.

Periodicals

Attner, Paul. Washington Post (March 18, 1973).

Calkins, Laurel Brubaker. "10 Again." People (July 15, 1996).

Golubev, Vladimir. Soviet Life (February, 1983).

Hersch, Hank. "Beaming Again." Sports Illustrated Classic (fall, 1992).

"Korbut Says Coach Forced Her to Have Sex." Globe and Mail (June 24, 1999).

Montville, Leigh. "Return of the Pixies." Sports Illustrated (November 27, 1989).

Montville, Leigh. "Forty for the Ages." Sports Illustrated (September 19, 1994).

"Olga's Midlife Crisis." Life (November, 1988).

Shaw, Bill. "Olga Korbut's Deadly Foe." People (March 4, 1991).

Torpy, Bill. "Life Turns Sour for Olympic Sweetheart Korbut." Atlanta Journal-Constitution (February 10, 2002).

Warren, Beth. "Olga Korbut Denies Any Link to Counterfeit Money at Former House." Atlanta Journal-Constitution (February 7, 2002).

Other

International Gymnast. http://www.intlgymnast.com/legends/korbut.html (January 14, 2003).

Olga Korbut Web Site. http://www.olgakorbut.com (January 14, 2003).

Red Files. http://www.pbs.org/redfiles/sports/deep/interv/s_int_olga_korbut.htm (January 14, 2003).

Sketch by Susan Salter