Sovetsky Sport. April 5, 1990. Everything about them is already out there. She is the nine-time Olympic champion, about whom sagas have been written - Larisa Latynina. He is the legendary Boris Shakhlin. She is a member of the Presidium of the All-Union Gymnastics Federation and senior coach of the Moscow national team. He is a member of the men's technical committee of the International Gymnastics Federation.
Very little is known about Mishakov. I looked through the newspapers of those times when Latynina and Shakhlin competed and won, but at that time it was not customary to mention the names of the coaches and, therefore, there is not a single line about the teacher of the champions. But without him, without Alexander Semyonovich Mishakov, there would have been no resounding Olympic victories in the 1950s and 1960s, nor those hundreds and hundreds of boys who fell in love with gymnastics who are today working exclusively with kids.
"As they sent me into retirement, I went to work as a trainer-consultant at a republican sports boarding school in Kiev. Since then I have only dealt with them. Otherwise, it was a very insulting send-off. They knew that I could still work for the glory of our sport. But apparently I was no longer needed. Anyway. Now I myself train 12-year-olds and pass on the most promising ones to younger colleagues. What else could it be? They must be given away. Otherwise, death to the cause..."
His coaching biography becan quite prosaically. In the mid 1930s he graduated from the Kharkov Institute of Physical Culture and remained there to work in the department. Before the war. With the first terrible salvos he left to become a partisan. He was taken out of the battle wounded. They treated him and he went to Sverdlovsk. There he, a highly qualified coach who had trained two national champions in the five pre-war years, served as chief of the regiment's physical training until 1944. Then came a call to Moscow. A new assignment - Kharkov again. Then, Kiev, where he moved with his students.
"I worked with both boys and girls then. Gymnastics was different, and it was possible to combine them. We trained every other day: one day for the boys, one day for the girls. Sometimes the whole group worked together. I didn't allow any jealousy on the part of my students - the cause is common, and it is above all. The same rules applied to coaches. Students were easily transferred to more professional colleagues. My friend Eduard Runkh gave me Boris Shakhlin, and Mikhail Sotnichenko gave me Larisa Latynina. We couldn't imagine any other relationship. After all, we worked for gymnastics..."
The first Olympics in which Soviet athletes took part. Helsinki 1952. Nina Bocharova, a student of Mishakov, performs brilliantly. There is a gold medal. Now one can only imagine what the coach and student, who were in love with their gymnastics, experienced. They had no experience, but they had to win. It was necessary for the cause they served, and also because it was better not to return home without a medal at all.
Everyone knows Latynina and Shakhlin. Journalists often write about them. But they forgot about the first Olympic champion in the history of Soviet artistic gymnastics, Nina Bocharova...
Since 1956, Mishakov became the coach of the country's national team. And a year later at the Rome Olympics, two of his students - Larisa Latynina and Boris Shakhlin - became the all-around champions of the Games. There is hardly another gymnastics coach like him on earth! It was an era that some called 'the era of Latynina' and that others called 'the era of Shakhlin,' but it was the era of Mishakov.
"After 1964, I completely switched to working with men - this was the order of the head coach of the national team, Valentin Muratov. I can't say that I was very worried. I understood that gymnastics was changing and the demands were growing. In short, it was necessary for the cause. Although I loved working with female gymnasts. Larisa Latynina was especially close. Just like my own daughter. She lived at my house, and we worked together at training sessions all the time..."
But, I think, it cannot be said that Mishakov completely moved away from the women's team. His work continued there by his students. After all, while raising champions, he also raised Astakhova and Natalia Kuchinskaya. But few people know that Smirnov became a master of sports by studying in Mishakov's group, listening to his lectures, and learning pedagogical wisdom. But time passed, the teacher's merits were forgotten, and one day there was an official who very politely offered Alexander Semyonovich 'a well-deserved rest.'
It is unlikely that people like Mishakov can be forced to take a break from work, especially from their beloved ones. And, to be honest, I don't know now - maybe Providence ordered it much more accurately, more correctly than we think, when it directed him to children. He loves them...
N. KALUGINA