Why I Wish the Russian Gymnasts Had Won

Katia Bachko on Russian gymnasts, and Reeves Wiedeman on Michael Phelps. Photograph by Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images.

Some things are an acquired taste. Oysters, say, require a certain suspension of disbelief in order to enjoy. Everyone, on the other hand, likes sweets. And everyone who is Russian has a thing for gymnastics. It’s an innate affinity. (Or maybe inane: gymnastics, like oysters, become bizarre and unpalatable under close scrutiny.) We are born loving vodka, cold winters, and pommel horses. But while my Russian birth affords me the ability to enjoy gymnastics without pondering its peculiarities, it hardly means that any gymnastics will do. Despite more than twenty years in the United States, I was pulling for Russia in the team finals on Tuesday, as I have in every Summer Olympics. They lost—to the Americans, who won the gold for the first time since 1996—but they shouldn’t have.

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I don’t root for the Russians out of any sense of ancestral loyalty. For me, it’s all in the ballet. Russians are famous for their ballerinas, because they know how to train them. The Vaganova method, which is one of the most popular systems of teaching dance, was created in St. Petersburg. The method is so successful that Russia produces a surplus of dancers; as Megan’s mother said on “Mad Men” last season, “Not every little girl gets to do whatever she wants. The world cannot support that many ballerinas.” So, true. This means that some end up abroad—the American Ballet Theatre, as Joan Acocella recently pointed out, often hires Russian ballerinas—or they go into teaching, and some teachers end up working with gymnasts.

The training they pass on, and the abilities it demands, are reflected in these athletes’ bodies. Take your typical American tumbler. She is a compactly packaged powerhouse. I remember thinking when Kerri Strug made that second vault, in 1996, with a sprained ankle and landed practically on one foot, That girl’s so strong, she could probably do that all the time. (And, indeed, in these Olympics, it was in the vault, their first rotation, that the Americans first established a commanding lead.) Russian gymnasts, on the other hand, tend to have a more elongated form; they’re still strong, sure, but the emphasis on balletic form creates a different look and a different sport.

Historically speaking, it may seem irrational to ask that gymnastics resemble dance. Ballet, after all, came from European court performances, whereas gymnastics evolved from physical training exercises. More to the point, gymnastics, though it is formally called artistic gymnastics, is a sport and ballet is an art. (There’s also rhythmic gymnastics, which is exactly what you would get if you turned a Cirque du Soleil show into a competition.) But, like many other disciplines—figure skating, diving, ski jumping—gymnastics is a sport in which the artfulness of the execution affects the final score, unlike say, soccer, in which a beautiful goal and an ugly one are equal. What’s more, gymnastics has appropriated terminology and movement from ballet into its standards: jetés and sissonnes, two types of ballet jumps figure often in routines. In no other sport, aside from synchronized swimming, figure skating, and maybe dressage, does musicality matter so much. According to the international judging guidelines for gymnastics, “The use of music in choreography utilizes the idea given by the music. All movements must fit perfectly with the chosen music and stay in time with beats / phrases.” Russians are the most successful at this—at least, they usually are.

The place where this fusion is on display is in the floor exercise; it’s an athletic sequence performed to music. Often, the best one can hope for is that it looks like a dance heightened by tumbling passes, like a musical in which talking is punctuated by singing. Instead, tumbling routines often have perfunctory dance sequences that don’t connect to the rest of the movement, and this is where the Russian emphasis on choreography helps. In Tuesday’s team final, it failed them; when Anastasia Grishina lost her rhythm, the entire routine collapsed. She scored a 12.466, almost three points below Aly Raisman’s top score, earning the lowest marks from among competitors on the top six teams.

One of the first things you notice in the floor exercise is the way the dance elements do, or don’t, connect the tumbling—and the way the movement reflects the music, or doesn’t. Another thing to watch is the feet, which are the focus of much training. In ballet, the pointed foot creates extension from the top of the thigh to the toes; without an emphasis on this stretch, gymnasts curl and clench the toes. When coaches put too much emphasis on strength training, athletes end up with bulky shoulder muscles which compromise the graceful, elevated carriage of the head, which is typical among Carly Patterson, Jordyn Wieber, and other American gymnasts. Pay attention to the way the head position changes as the torso moves. Graceful, fluid neck movement creates dynamic, pleasing movement; a tight upper body gives the impression of tension. These minor but important differences reflect the influence of ballet training. If they stop mattering, in terms of points and, ultimately, victories, the sport will be the worse for it.

In the qualifying round, the Russian gymnasts Viktoria Komova and Aliya Mustafina didn’t deliver their best performances on the floor, but even still, Komova was ranked number one overall, perhaps because the balletic appearance can help camouflage tumbling flaws. In the team finals, the Russians fell apart on the floor. The only apparatus on which they bested the Americans was on the uneven bars; Komova stumbled on the beam. The power of American tumbling was on display as Raisman, Wieber, and Gabby Douglas won easily.

I knew that they deserved it. Perhaps, beyond the Russians’ balletic prowess, the real reason that I wish the Russians had won is nostalgia. Russian dominance on the balance beam reminds me of my childhood, when the simple pleasure of the Olympics was waiting for the announcers to describe the color of the gymnasts’ leotards in an age of black and white television. That era is gone, and these gymnasts will return to a country run by Vladimir Putin. Didn’t they deserve a glimmer of gold?

See our full coverage of the Games at The Olympic Scene.

Photograph by Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images.