Looping loop

40 years ago, the European and Gymnastics World Champion Elena Mukhina crashed in training before the Olympics-80 and was chained to bed

Elena Vyacheslavovna was gone in December 2006. On the monument next to the image of the exercise on the girl’s log, two words are written: “Great gymnast”. And this is true. Although her career ended at the age of 20, and Mukhin did not have time to participate in the Olympic Games ...

In Montreal-76, the leaders of the national team from Moscow did not dare to take for various reasons, although experts already called the program of a modest baby with the sad eyes of the “cosmic”. Her army coach Mikhail Klimenko, to whom she hit at the age of 14, firmly decided that Lena’s trump card would be incredible difficulty.

This difficulty, coupled with the obsession and despotism of a specialist who has never worked with women before, will make the Mukhin famous and be destroyed.

The quiet girl that the grandmother raised (her mother died when Lena was small, and her father started a new family), Mikhail Yakovlevich obeyed implicitly. And she performed even when it was from a medical point of view, to put it mildly, unsafe. For example, at the Cup of the USSR, she seriously damaged Achilles, but the coach, who promised the doctor to remove her from the competition, the next day he drove the crumbling athlete to the platform. And in 1975, at the Spartakiad of the Peoples of the USSR, Lena after an unsuccessful landing occurred, the spinous processes of the cervical vertebrae occurred. With such an injury, for a minute, it is impossible to turn your head. However, every day Klimenko came to her hospital and took him to the hall, where she trained all day without an orthopedic collar.

Fearing to complain that by the evening the body began to go numb.

On the fractures of the ribs, a concussion of the brain and knocked out her fingers, she did not even pay attention. In order not to faint, the ammonia sniffed secretly and took another run. After all, the country required victories and medals, and the coaches were severely punished for failures.

... The world learns about Lena in 1977. At the European Championship in Prague, she will slightly yield in the personal standings of the legendary Nadechi and will win three gold medals in separate shells, conquering the judges and fans of the highest equipment. It is in the Czech Republic that the future champion of the USSR will first perform a unique trick, later named after it.

From the memoirs of the five -time Olympic champion Nelly Kim
“Lena had a miracle element on the bars, which was called“ Mukhina's Loop ”. Klimenko, at the suggestion of his brother, Viktor decided to improve the “Corbut loop” - it turned out something amazing. Spectators gasp and close their eyes, and Mukhina, as in the circus, soars over the bars and flutters in the air. ”

And although the gymnastics has gone ahead of 40 years, both of the virtuoso combinations are striking today.

Moreover, they are so dangerous that they have long been prohibited for execution.

There will be no equal on the planet Lena in 1978. In Strasbourg, she will become the fourth Soviet gymnast after Galina Shamrai, Larisa Latynina and Lyudmila Turishcheva, who wore a world crown, and will fall on the cover of the “light”. The Romanian Prima team will then say about Mukhin: “She will soon turn into an Olympic champion. She has no weaknesses. ”

But the triumph itself, exhausted by endless injuries, dreamed of finishing her career.

“I cried on the French pedestal not with joy, but because I understood: no one would let me go,” Mukhina later admits.

And how to release a universal favorite before home games? He did not “help” Lena to slide off the fracture of the legs at demonstrations in England in 1979. After a month, it turns out that the bones dispersed. But after a painful execution and with a new white boot on her leg, she worked out all her elements the very next day, landing on the jumps on one leg. The restless Mikhail Klimenko, who was also the Major of the Soviet Army, understood that his fate was completely and completely in the hands of Lena. Since at that time she was the only gymnast from CSKA, who could get to the Olympics, where our women's team was considered the main contender for gold.

For her last July collection in Minsk, Mukhina came with various injuries and inflammations. But, according to the team's friends, she worked almost the most. And, when Mikhail Klimenko left for a couple of days to Moscow to convince the doubtful authorities to take the team to his student, Elena, despite the pain in the ankle, decided to complete the most difficult somersault with a turn of 540 degrees in training. But due to the fact that she was unsuccessfully pushed, there was no complete rotation, and the gymnast simply crashed back into the floor.

She was taken to the hospital, and the worst was soon confirmed: Lena's cervical vertebra was damaged.

Mukhina’s operation will be done only on the third day. The necessary doctors from the military hospital were on vacation ... Professor Livshits specially flew to Minsk, but it was already unrealistic to return it to independently move. It’s good that the famous neurosurgeon saved her at all. After all, when the spinal cord is in a stifled state for a long time, we are not talking about a complete recovery, but about life and death. A motionless Helen will be brought to Moscow in two weeks. At the Belarusian station, it will have to be pulled through the train window ... For about a year she will be in the hospital on Krasnaya Presnya, she will transfer several more operations, and then 25 years (only think!) In a small apartment in Petrovsko-Razumovskaya, where her grandmother and close friend will take care of her. Unfortunately, Dikul Lena’s system is not suitable: her kidneys will refuse huge loads.

But Mukhina, who could not even keep a spoon on her own, did not give up for a minute. Being completely paralyzed and realizing all the tragedy of her position, she will graduate from the Moscow Institute of Physical Education, will be carried away by psychology and philosophy, turn to God and will never complain of its fate. In 1982, the IOC President Juan Antonio Samararanch will personally come to Lena and present her to the International Olympic Order.

The leaders from the Sports Committee of the USSR, who provided simultaneous assistance, in essence, soon forgot about Lena. And until she was pierced by a personal presidential pension, she lived on disability benefits.

And to the pension of the grandmother, whose death in 2005 will hit Lena especially strongly. And by that time her father will come to her daughter only in order to ask for money ...

... Nobody, of course, began to look for the extreme in the history of Mukhina. And no punishment was followed to anyone. The opinions of people involved in the gymnastic world about the incident were divided. Lyudmila Turishcheva will consider the guilty to the concentration of Lena. Mikhail Voronin will call this a terrible combination of circumstances. Lidia Ivanova and Larisa Latynina, like most experts, will put all the dogs on Mikhail Klimenko, who somehow threw such a phrase to his ward:

"You will be left alone only when you break on the platform."

Of course, the coach, who emigrated with the whole family to Italy, had in mind a completely different one. He will die almost after Lena, with whom they, for obvious reasons, will not meet more ...

The athlete herself, remembering her life in gymnastics, will once say:

“I felt like an animal that was driven by a whip along an endless corridor. I had to listen to the fact that I was a cattle and should be happy that they paid attention to me and gave a chance. ”

And she did not hide that she wanted to rush under the car many times, going to training, and saw her fatal fall in a dream in the smallest details.