Komsomolskaya Pravda. December 20, 1976. The young gymnasts participating in the USSR Youth Championship displayed courage and skill on the Odessa platform.
Elena Mukhina, a resident of Moscow, finished her floor exercise routine and the scoreboard at the Odessa Sports Palace displayed a score of 11.15 points. To the uninitiated, this might have seemed like a typo since, as is well known, the highest possible score in gymnastics competitions is 10 points. This time everything was correct: participants in the national youth championship received an additional three- to five-tenths of a point for elements of the highest difficulty category. Lena Mukhina's performances, especially in the floor exercises, had plenty of such elements. The young protege of Merited Coach of the USSR Klimenko became the all-around champion and won two more gold medals on individual events.
Other participants in these competitions also demonstrated very difficult routines. Around the world, only a handful of masters include a triple somersault from the horizontal bar in their programs. But in Odessa, two of the top prize winners on this apparatus - Anatoly Shikovets from Minsk and Alexander Agafonov from Moscow - performed this dismount. The spectators also witnessed some elements that were performed for the first time in the world at an official competition. Remember: in Montreal Nellie Kim won a gold for the Tsukahara with a 360-degree twist vault. In Odessa, Natasha Tereschenko performed a Tsukahara with a 540-degree twist. "Patents" were also awarded to Viktor Levenkov, who completed his rings routine with a triple somersault, Lena Aleksyutina for her "360-degree flip and forward somersault" vault, and Valeriya Zhidunova and Lena Mukhina, who added a twist to the Korbut loop on the uneven bars.
"Even we, the specialists, are simply amazed by the skill of the young gymnasts," said Larisa Latynina, the senior coach of the national team and Merited Master of Sports, after the competition. "It's especially gratifying that the concept of the so-called 'periphery' is completely disappearing in our gymnastics. Gymnasts from regional and district centers are no longer intimidated, as before, by those trained by coaches from the capital. Natasha Tereschenko, for example, lives in the small town of Ust-Omchug in the Magadan region, and Stella Zakharova, who took second place in the all-around competition, is from Kishinev, which was not previously considered a gymnastics center."
The tournament in Odessa was one of the first opportunities for our young gymnasts to test their skills before the Moscow Olympics of 1980. But the Odessa spectators also saw one of the champions of the Montreal Olympics among the participants - 15-year-old Masha Filatova. She took third place in the all-around competition and was first in the balance beam exercises.
In the men's all-around competition, the champion was Sergei Khizhnyakov from Rostov. He also won on the floor and the parallel bars. The team victory went to the young gymnasts of the Armed Forces. Second place went to Burevestnik, and third place to Labor Reserves.
G. SHVETS