Sovetsky Sport. November 13, 1966. The results of the world gymnastics championships, which recently ended in the West German city of Dortmund, can be viewed in two ways. On the one hand, there is no doubt about the success of Mikhail Voronin, who became the all-around world champion, and Natalia Kuchinskaya who, although she lost the championship to the remarkable Czechoslovakian gymnast Vera Caslavska, managed to take three out of four gold medals that were contested in the apparatus finals. Sergei Diomidov's victory on the parallel bars was also pleasing.
At the same time, we cannot discount the defeat (for the first time after 14 years of hegemony) of our women's team, and especially the fact that the gap in points between the Japanese men's team and ours has grown significantly compared to the Olympics in Tokyo.
Today we publish materials, the authors of which express many different points of view on this matter. The truth is born in disputes, and to correct the situation, in order to experience a feeling of complete confidence in the strength of our gymnastics at the 1968 Olympics, we must now speak frankly. The editorial board of 'Sovetsky Sport' proposes to hold a roundtable meeting of coaches, gymnasts, and judges during the USSR team championship, which will begin on November 17 in Tashkent, in order to continue the conversation that has begun. But we also appeal to those gymnastics fans who will not be able to visit Tashkent - write to us, express your thoughts on the issues raised. We will publish the most interesting ones as a roundtable presentation in absentia.
The mood of the gymnasts and coaches after the recent world championship is not bad. However, we have no right to reassure ourselves, because the gold medals of the team championship have been taken to other countries! In order for this sad circumstance not to repeat itself again, we must understand its causes and draw the necessary conclusions for ourselves.
It is necessary to first dwell on those shortcomings that are typical for both the men's and women's teams. First of all, we cannot ignore the fact that not everything is well with the preparation of reserves, with their introduction into the main team. The lasting success of the national team, as is known, depends not so much on its coaches, but on how the gymnasts are trained locally. The task of the national team is to bring them to 'condition.' Meanwhile, in physical culture collectives, athletes are often trained slowly and poorly. It happens that for many years, quite talented gymnasts remain in the category of 'promising' or 'hopeful,' but their potential is never realized, and they never bring the team any medals or scores. This sometimes happens because our coaches do not use the abilities of their students enough, do not believe in their talent, and do not use those well-tested methods that have proven themselves in practice and are theoretically justified. Correcting a gymnast's shortcomings once he has already joined the national team is not at all easy; it sometimes takes more than one year.
Apparently, if coaches had developed sufficient work ability in their students in a timely manner, the competition results would have been better. After all, M. Voronin (he has turned 21) proved to his peers that a young man of that age can have great efficiency, and that it is this quality that gives good technical results. But such young gymnasts are still very rare in the national team.
However, it is impossible to consider that this is the only shortcoming of the national team. We sometimes show too much caution when selecting the team. I think that two years ago we should have introduced young and capable gymnasts (and we still have such gymnasts among young men and women, although in small numbers) into the main team instead of famous veterans, 'fired' them in a series of international competitions, and brought them to the world championship.
The failures in team competitions are explained, of course, not only by the difficulties of staffing the women's and especially the men's team, but also by a number of other factors. It is quite obvious that without updating the optional routines, our team could not even think about success at the world championships. The two years of preparation were largely filled with work related to mastering new elements and routines for the optional program.
The lessons of Dortmund showed that this position was correct - without difficult exercises, there would have been no gold medals for Voronin, Diomidov, or Kuchinskaya. But making the optional routines more difficult led to some delay in the beginning of mastering the compulsory exercises (not all the gymnasts of the national team coped with the optional one on time, according to the plan). As a result, by the start of the competition in Germany, there were still shortcomings in the compulsory program - more precisely, some exercises were not technically sufficiently stabilized.
It must be admitted that not everything is going well with the psychological preparation of gymnasts for competitions. Some gymnasts performed below their capabilities at the world championship, as it seems to us, only because they were poorly prepared psychologically. This applies primarily to such strong masters as Titov and Diomidov.
One of the weakest points in the preparation of our men's and women's teams is the vault. We are clearly lagging behind our main competitors here, and not in the difficulty of the vaults themselves but in the amplitude, purity, and precision of the landing. The trouble is that we do not use the proposals that were put forward by our scientists several years ago - about how to develop vaulting ability, how to practice the technique of pushing off with the hands and legs, how to perform motor actions in the free flight phase. Alas, gymnasts rarely do this. All training work often comes down to repeating programmed vaults, although such a method brings little benefit. We must demand that coaches take the matter more seriously.
We must not forget about our shortcomings in dismounting from the apparatus. Sometimes even with the easiest dismount we lose valuable shares of points. This happens for two reasons: firstly, we do not develop in gymnasts the ability to clearly maintain balance at the moment of landing, we do not properly equip the muscles of the lower limbs, and secondly (and this is perhaps the main thing), we do not work out the dismount technique properly. After all, even if the gymnast has very well-developed muscles of the lower limbs and a well-trained sense of balance, he will still not be able to stick if he has an incorrect dismount technique - a fall or at least a step is inevitable.
Finally, about one more shortcoming that, fortunately, our female athletes are spared, but which affects the men. I'm talking about acrobatics on the floor exercise. Even our finalist in this event, Valery Karasev, was unable to earn anything, although he performed his routine quite beautifully and precisely. His exercise turned out to be too weak acrobatically.
The thing is that learning new difficult acrobatic elements at 20-22 years old is already difficult - it's too late. This should be done much earlier - at the age of juniors.
Let's move on to the women's team. For the first time since 1952, they lost the gold medal to the Czechoslovakian gymnasts. Of course, their advantage of 0.038 is minimal, and gymnastics judging is relatively subjective. But let's not console ourselves. To win, you need to have a noticeable advantage over your rivals, and our women's team has not yet managed to create such superiority.
At the world championships we saw a number of gymnasts (including the Czechoslovakian team) demonstrating vaults with a larger amplitude and a cleaner landing. True, our gymnasts performed more difficult vaults (mostly with twists), but they were not done with a lot of amplitude and had landing errors.
The optional routines of our gymnasts on the uneven bars also require serious corrections. Some of the foreign athletes (Czechoslovakia, Japan, the GDR, and the USA) demonstrated more interesting and original routines. Our exercises on the bars should be more meaningful, dynamic, difficult. I would like the girls to perform routines on the balance beam even more confidently, boldly, and without pauses.
Our team left a wonderful impression in the floor execises - such a complete expression of a musical piece in the movements of the gymnasts, even the most sophisticated gymnastics fan had hardly seen before. But here too, a number of our gymnasts made small but annoying mistakes in acrobatic elements.
Although we have lost gold medals in both men's and women's team competitions, this does not mean that our system of training high-class gymnasts needs revision. We believe that we need to be on the right path. The successes of the young people Voronin and Kuchinskaya convince us of this. But outstanding talents are not a frequent occurrence. The more young people will be involved in gymnastics and the better the educational work with them is organized, the more talents there will be.
Children's and youth sports schools should, of course, play a special role in preparing reserves. After all, for the first time in history of world gymnastics, a person aged 21 became a world champion, and a 17-year-old girl won three gold medals at such a prestigious competition. These are very important facts, indicating that it is possible to train masters of international class much faster than we do now, and at an earlier age. The fate of Soviet gymnastics depends on the quality of the work of the coaches who train the reserves of big gymnastics, on the teachers of the children's and youth sports schools.
V. MURATOV, senior coach of the USSR team
M. UKRAN, chairmen of the scientific and methodological council of the USSR Gymnastics Federation
Ya. FRADKOV, deputy chairman of the USSR Gymnastics Federation