After 8 consecutive Olympics, the Uzbek gymnast missed out on the Paris Games
The entire sports universe is asking itself one question after another: Who will be the main protagonists of Paris 2024? Whether it is in the form of new records being broken, of Forewarned farewells – Andy Murray in tennis – or in curiosities from trivia night on the extremes of sport. From the eleven-year-old Chinese skater Zheng Haohaothe youngest athlete of these games to the oldest, the seventy-year-old Australian rider Mary Hanna: we are all waiting to see what memorable stories this edition of the Olympics will leave us.
In some places, however, what will be done is to count the absences. For one reason or another, some of the biggest names in sports are missing: Tadej Pogacarfresh from the amazing Giro-Tour double, has decided to skip the Games, as well as the Spanish Vuelta, to concentrate on the dream of the rainbow jersey; athletics must mourn the absences of three out of scale champions such as the record holder in the triple jump Yulimar Rojasthe two-time champion of 100 and 200 Elaine Thompson-Herahboth out due to injury and the Olympic champion in the 800 Athing Mufallen during the very tough final of the trials Americans.
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Among the stories of those who will not be there, it would be easy to miss that of an athlete who – now many years away from the top of her sport – has never stopped making history. Oksana Chusovitina would have liked to do it once again, on French soil. In fact, if in artistic gymnastics the main theme of these games is the return to five rings of Simone Bilesthe last few months have brought about a scenario that most fans, and certainly the entire competing athletic body, have no memory of: the Olympics. without the Uzbek athlete.
At the last race to try to snatch the Olympic pass, in front of the home crowd at Tashkentthe gymnast born in 1975 was injured during the final stages of training, having to say goodbye to the dream of participating for the ninth time in the five-ring event. 9 Olympics would have led her to detach the Italian-German rower Josefa Idem, with only 8 participations, and to approach the Canadian rider Ian Millar and the Georgian shooter Nino Salukvadzewho will reach double figures in Paris, in the ranking of the most present in the history of the Games.
Citando “The Gambler”, Ian Millar spiega la sua decisione di ritirarsi: “know when to hold’em, know when to fold’em, know when to walk away”
Olympic champion in the team event in Barcelona 1992 and bronze in Beijing 2008 in vaultChusovitina won 11 world medals in a thirty-year career, representing three nations – USSR (albeit with different definitions including CSI and Unified Team), Uzbekistan e Germania – competed against numerous athletes younger than her son Alisher, and repeatedly rewrote the line at what it means to compete beyond a certain age in a sport historically dominated by young, often not yet teenage, female athletes.
Born in Bukhara – a UNESCO heritage site for its splendid Islamic architecture – in June 1975, Chusovitina began her high-level career in 1988when she won the USSR Junior Championships. Already two years later she won two golds – team and vault – at the Goodwill Games.
These were nothing but the creature of Ted Turnerfounder of CNN, in the mid-1980s, in reaction to the climate of boycotts and counter-boycotts which had involved Moscow 1984 and Los Angeles 1988 – the Goodwill Games would cease to exist at the dawn of the 2000s, when the world political situation was very different from the one that had caused their inception – only to obtain their first global successes in 1991.
A IndianapolisChusovitina took home three world medals: gold in team and floor exercise, silver in vaulting – a discipline in which she would specialize later in her career and which would give her the other eight world medals in her list of achievements, including the gold medal won against Uzbekistan at Anaheim 2003.
The dissolution of the USSR had led her to abandon the state-of-the-art sports centre in Krugloye Ozero – “round lake”, so called because in nearby Agafonikha there is, surprisea round lake – for training at the federal center in Tashkent: a place that has remained behind the times in sport, a remnant of an era where Chusovitina wasn’t even born, making her consistency at a high level even more impressive despite a considerable competitive disadvantage.
Chusovitina’s only individual world medal came not from vaulting
Meanwhile, in the athlete’s private life, something happened that was destined to upset the history of sport. In 1994at the Asian Games, the gymnast meets a fellow countryman wrestler, Bakhodir Khurbanovactive in the featherweight division, and married him three years later. In November 1999 his firstborn would be born, Alisher.
In the 2002the child was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia: with the support of Shanna and Peter Bruggemantwo coaches from Cologne, and with the solidarity of the entire gymnastics world, Chusovitina’s family settled in Germany to have access to better care. To thank the Teutonic country for the support to the son – completely healed, he is still alive today -, Chusovitina has obtained from the Uzbek federation the possibility of represent Germanyas it would begin to do from 2006 to 2012.
Interestingly, during this period a custom will be born that will become a habit for Chusovitina: announce retirement and then return to racing. In 2009 she announced that the World Championships in London would be her last, and that she would not, as previously stated, compete in the 2012 Olympics – she would go, finishing 5th in vault.
At the end of the Games, it was said Truly ready to give up discipline for to dedicate herself to the role of coachto then reappear the following year again with the Uzbek colours, winning a silver at the Asian Games in Incheon 2014. Always, of course, in vaulting.
The only thing missing in Chusovitina’s glittering career was winning an Olympic medal with his Uzbekistan. The dream of giving her country an Olympic medal had pushed her, after having announced her retirement for the umpteenth time following the Tokyo Games, to dedicate her body for another three years to a inflexible, implacable and non-negotiable disciplinechasing a dream that would have legendary contours.
In recent years, Chusovitina has increasingly devoted herself exclusively to vaulting and, while continuing to sporadically obtain high-level results, she has shown the natural difficulty imposed by timehaving missed out on access to the finals of the vault in Tokyo. Another Olympic medal seemed like a mirage, but perhaps it is precisely in this that dedication, or rather devotionby Chusovitina to the discipline to which she has dedicated her life perfectly hits the nail on the head of why sport is so fascinating: ultimately, it’s an effort useless.
The 8 Games of Oksana Chusovitina
In its very origins, sport is something uselessa pastime like philately, with the difference that it requires to push your body to the limits of its possibilities. Sport asks questions that Nobody he asked himself and answers you with the dedication that Galileo put into his discoveries. What kind of progress has humanity achieved when Oksana Chusovitina completed, in free body, a double somersault with twistone of the five athletic gestures – also two on the uneven bars and two on the vault – that take her name? Absolutely Nobodyand it is precisely this the wonder.
Obviously, with time and the entry of large capital, sport has become something much more complex. He has lost his innocence, but the initiatory spirit, which brings future athletes, still young, closer to their favourite discipline, is still the same. It is no coincidence that in sports practice at a young age we try to emphasize the aspect of fundell’experienceof the try.
In this sense, Nobody manages to symbolize the pure joy of doing sports just to overcome one’s limits, the very close thing to madness that is needed to set utopian goals, more than Oksana Chusovitina. Or more than anything the time she continued to donate to artistic gymnastics: perhaps the most complex discipline of the Olympics, certainly the one furthest from any human activity that can be defined dailythe most conceptually difficult one since it is difficult to imagine the muscular strength, elasticity and body awareness needed to complete a movement.
The series of announced and then appropriately postponed withdrawals, now almost a habit for Chusovitina, can leave a sort of bitter taste in the mouth. They may appear as a sign of desperation, such as inability to move forwardcan seem like the relapses of a person suffering from addiction. Who saw Cristiano Ronaldo at Euro 2024 and didn’t think that it would have been better if he had left?
Oksana Chusovitina has been dedicating most of her days to artistic gymnastics for 42 years. Maybe she continues because she doesn’t know what to do without it, a sort of tragic heroine to Mr. Peanutbutter’s Bojack Horsemanwho cannot accept the exit from his prime while, paraphrasing All Too Well Taylor Swift, she ages even if her rivals remain the same age.
Come we live a story often depends on thecorner from which we observe it for the first time.
When I first started getting to know Oksana Chusovitina, she had been introduced to me solo in the extraordinary nature of a person capable of continuing to qualify for the most important events in the sport associated par excellence with youth, in which one rarely remains at high levels after a pregnancy – more for the stigma internalized by the discipline than anything else. In this sense, perhaps I am still unable to see the potentially negative sides of this story.
But in the end, view Oksana Chusovitina at the Olympics reminded us not only of What means to be passionate about sports, what mechanism brings us closer to the disciplines long before the option of even earning something becomes realistic. He has put us in front of the evidence of how fulfilling it can be, an act of self-love, to put effort into something that the rest of the world perceives as useless o impossiblejust because we want to.
In Paris 2024 this scene will not be repeated, these considerations will not seem so elementary to us. It will be a disappointment that we knew would come.even for Oksana Chusovitina, but perhaps, deep down, we thought we would never want to live. Or should.
2024-08-03 07:00:00
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