Elena Mukhina - Injury

Injury

Mukhina's floor exercise tumbling passes were considered revolutionary at the time because they included a never-before seen combination salto (the "Muchina"), but in 1979, her coach wanted her to become one of the few female gymnasts doing an element taken from men's gymnastics, the Thomas salto (a 1 and 3/4 flip with 1½ twists ending in a forward roll, perfected by American gymnast Kurt Thomas). Even though she won the All Around title and floor exercises at the 1978 world championship with daring bar routines, a revolutionary balance beam dismount, and a floor routine with its own signature move, she was pressured to add this element to her floor exercises by her own coach and other higher-ranking Soviet coaches. Mukhina soon realized the Thomas salto was extremely dangerous for a woman because it depended on being able to get enough height and speed to make all the flips and mid-air twists and still land in-bounds with enough room to do the forward roll, and it took near-perfect timing to avoid either under-rotation (and landing on the chin) or over-rotation (and landing on the back of the head). In the 1991 documentary More than a Game, Mukhina spoke of trying to convince her coach that the Thomas salto was a dangerous element:

"...my injury could have been expected. It was an accident that could have been anticipated. It was inevitable. I had said more than once that I would break my neck doing that element. I had hurt myself badly several times but he (coach Mikhail Klimenko) just replied people like me don't break their necks."

In 1979, while training for the 1979 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships, Mukhina suffered a broken leg, which kept her out of the World Championships in Fort Worth, Texas, a competition in which the Soviet team suffered its first defeat at the hands of their archrivals from Romania, with only Nellie Kim and Stella Zakharova able to medal in apparatus and All Around disciplines. With less than a year until the 1980 Summer Olympics to be held in Moscow, the pressure was on the Soviet team coaches and doctors to get the previous All Around champion Mukhina back on her feet and ready for the games. In an interview with Ogonyok magazine, Mukhina blamed the doctors at TsITO (Central Institute of Traumatology and Orthopedics) who were serving the National Team for attempting to rush her back into training too soon, saying she begged them not to remove her cast and discharge her because "they're dragging me from home to workouts" and she knew she was not yet healed. When doctors removed her cast against her wishes and had her try walking on the leg, she said that she knew she was walking "crookedly" and that something was not right. The TsITO doctors X-rayed the leg and discovered that the fracture had not healed properly and would not be able to sustain the pounding of gymnastics in its present condition. Mukhina was rushed into surgery that afternoon, but the damage had already been done to her reputation; one of the National Team coaches, she said in the Ogonyok interview, showed up at her bed the day after surgery and outright stated that she "wasn't conscientious" and that she could still "train in a cast." Once more against her wishes, the doctors removed her cast prematurely, and Mukhina returned to training for the Olympics while beginning a strenuous workout program at CSKA Moscow to lose the weight she had gained while laid up from surgery.

With lingering weakness in her leg and mounting exhaustion from the grueling weight loss workouts, Mukhina had great difficulty coming back up to speed on what was to be the new end element of one of her floor exercise tumbling passes, the Thomas salto, Despite Mukhina's warnings that the element was constantly causing minor injuries and was dangerous enough to potentially cause major injuries, she was pushed to keep the element in her floor routine, and she continued to practise it even knowing it was a dangerous element. On July 3, 1980, two weeks before the Moscow Olympics, Mukhina was practicing the pass containing the Thomas salto when she under-rotated the salto, crash-landed on her chin, and her spine snapped. She was instantly rendered a quadriplegic. Mukhina was training at the Minsk Palace of Sport when the injury occurred; her coach Klimenko was not present at the time of the accident. The Soviet Union awarded her Order of Lenin in response to her injury and in 1983, Juan Samaranch, the IOC President, awarded her the Silver Medal of the Olympic Order.

Following the injury, the Soviet Gymnastics Federation remained secretive about the events surrounding Mukhina's cataclysmic injury, with Soviet Team Coach Yuri Titov as the point man discouraging reporters' questions by playing coy regarding Mukhina's condition and deflecting inquiries about whether she would be trying for a comeback in 1984, even blaming Mukhina's "injury" on attempting a skill that she "was not able to do but thought she needed to make the teamshe suffered injury and missed her chance.All the bad stories, they are not true." Meanwhile, as word spread among the Olympic community that Mukhina's injuries were far worse than the Soviet spokesmen were saying, coaches all over the world wondered not only what the specific injury was, but how the accident had happened. Initial rumors were that she had fallen on approach to the vault, then Soviet newspapers reported she'd fallen during her dismount from the balance beam and had a blackout but then got back up to finish her floor exercise without knowing how badly she'd been injured, then finally word emerged that she had fallen catastrophically during the floor exercise. Elena herself was reclusive following the incident, seldom publicly discussing the accident. In a rare interview with Ogonyok magazine, Elena spoke about the Soviet gymnastics program, criticizing it for deceiving the public about her injury, and for the system's insatiable desire for gold medals and championships:

"...for our country, athletic successes and victories have always meant somewhat more than even simply the prestige of the nation. They embodied (and embody) the correctness of the political path we have chosen, the advantages of the system, and they are becoming a symbol of superiority. Hence the demand for victory - at any price. As for risk, well... We've always placed a high value on risk, and a human life was worth little in comparison with the prestige of the nation; we've been taught to believe this since childhood.There are such concepts as the honor of the club, the honor of the team, the honor of the national squad, the honor of the flag. They are words behind which the person isn't perceived. I'm not condemning anyone or blaming anyone for what happened to me. Not Klimenko or especially the national team coach at that time, Shaniyazov. I feel sorry for Klimenko - he's a victim of the system, a member of the clan of grownups who are 'doing their job.' Shaniyazov I simply don't respect. And the others? I was injured because everyone around me was observing neutrality and keeping silent. After all, they saw that I wasn't ready to perform that element. But they kept quiet. Nobody stopped a person who, forgetting everything, was tearing forward - go, go, go!"

Despite this, Mukhina took some of the responsibility for not saying no to protect herself from further harm, and noted that her first thought as she lay on the floor with her neck severely broken was, "Thank God, I won't be going to the Olympics."