Sovetsky Sport. November 3, 1973. During our championship coverage, we'll introduce you to a few coaches whose names (as well as those of their students) have resounded loudly in recent years. It seems that the emergence of a great coach is a more significant fact that the emergence of a great athlete, because the former is necessary for the latter: if there are coaches, there will be athletes. We want to give young gymnastics teachers the opportunity to express their credo and briefly introduce them to you. Today Minsk resident A. Ovsyak will speak.
Let's take the bull by the horns - how to defeat the Japanese? I still don't know for sure, I don't think anyone here is trying to figure out how to achieve the desired perfection. I look at our guys: they have everything, they have the conditions, the guys are capable, and you can't say that they don't strive to win. Everything is there, but there's not enough character.
Kolya Andrianov is a talent. He saw Tsukahara's dismount from the high bar and immediately learned it, and in a very correct and rational way. My Volodya Shchukin, when he was learning his dismount from the rings, didn't rush blindly, but also rationally approached it. He told me that it is even easier for him to do two somersaults with two twists than just a double somersault - "I can see the platform."
Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that we are ahead of the Japanese in the technique of performing difficult stunts. One of the reasons for this, in my opinion, is that acrobatics is well developed in our country. Acrobats achieved this by going through setbacks, and we gymnasts, to some extent, came to the ready. For example, we used to think: in order to spin a double somersault, you need to tuck with all your might, and hold on to your knees. But it turns out that even if you perform two somersaults with two half twists, you have to go into this difficult rotation freely, without the help of hands. Then is will succeed. I repeat, we took this and other things from acrobatics. The Japanese do such tricks less competently.
And what should our 1976 Olympian - the one who can beat the Japanese - be like? He should have a difficult combination of risky elements on every apparatus and perform them easily and freely, so that the spectator's heart does not ache at the danger, but still captures the spirit. Can our guys work like that? They can. What are they lacking? A lot of hard work during trainings. Our guys, I repeat, grasp everything quickly, but they do not like to refine, to polish to full gloss, to full stability. How does a ballerina work at the barre? Even a great one? One-two-three, one-two-three - every day without end. And a lot of gymnasts don't like that.
I don't know about anyone else, but mine must be constantly pushed, constantly persuaded...
So, there is a lot of talent: take the Russian team, the Moscow team, the team from Belorussia. Is it impossible to choose six or eight people? But obviously, either we, the coaches, failed to inspire them to a serious fight with our main rivals, or the gymnasts themselves do not have enough zeal. What is lacking in the end is a consciousness of one's duty.
No, of course, things are not as bad as they were a few years ago. In Munich, Andrianov was seriously determined to fight the Japanese, and in general his appearance gave us a breath of fresh air, and other young gymnasts followed him. But our young people are too easily satisfied with what they have achieved. You must give everything to gymnastics, subordinate your life to it in the short years allotted to you for sports, so that later you have the right to say: I did what I could.
Anatoly Ovsyak, 36, is the coach of the 1972 Olympic team member Vladimir Shchukin and alternate Nikolai Nedbalsky. When he says that he sometimes yells at his students, you don't believe him because he says it in a quiet, soft, intelligent voice, which is a general characteristic of the thoughtful and deprecating Ovsyak.
He was born in Siberia, started as a gymnast in the Baltic States - without coaches, self-taught. Teaching self-reliance in students is what he is particularly concerned about. "I had a horse at home, I made the pommels myself, but which of the young ones how have at least rings hanging in their apartment?" On the other hand, he understands: modern gymnastics is so complicated, such a load - including psychological - is experienced by the athlete that, perhaps, even in the gym he gets tired of looking at these rings... Ovsyak is a person who tends to consider all possible aspects in any problem.
"You know, I like to poke around for a long time..." when in Minsk he, a young guy, was appointed head coach of the children's and youth sports school, the energetic deputy chairman of the Republican Sports Committee G. Vokyun noisily rebelled against it: it's too early, although let him coach. Ovsyak long and quietly proved that as a coach he would have to recruit five groups, chase the 'score,' and nothing good will come of it, and as a head coach with a degree, he will manage in his free time and take a group and begin to tinker around to his heart's content. He proved himself - Shchukin and Nedbalsky are from that group.
He considers himself a boring person. "If I take something up, I need to see the final result today - teaching an element and building it. Maybe it's hard for the guys when I make them repeat, refine, and polish again and again, but I don't know how to do otherwise."
Conscientiousness and reliability are charcteristic of Ovsyak's work, conscientiousness and reliability are the main thing in the impression that he makes.