Sovetsky Sport. July 6, 1968. A man has lost his peace. He can't find peace because our female gymnasts lost the world championship. Why did the motto of a children's (precisely children's!) sports school become the words: "Our goal is to create a team that will regain the title of the best in the world." What is this - passion? Devotion to gymnastics? It's more than that. It's a goal for which a lot is at stake in life. What can repay sleepless nights spent in agonizing thoughts, days filled from morning to night with constant toil in gyms completely unsuitable for training? Honors? Titles? All this already exists. Only the satisfaction of something done with one's own hands can satiate the passion of a person living in the name of his sporting idea.
...The laboratory is bright and cozy. As expected, the research is presented with rigorous graphs, tables, and film clips. The bulky equipment is enhanced with seemingly simple devices of our own design. However, there is only one person here in a white coat - a doctor.
The head of the laboratory, or rather the Voronezh Sports School, is Merited Coach of the USSR Yuri Eduardovich Shtukman. Behind him, naturally, stands a small team of diligent workers with ample opportunity for independent research. The products of this laboratory include Olympic champion T. Lyukhina, world champion I. Pervushina, Spartakiad and USSR Cup medalist L. Burda, member of the USSR national team A. Demyanenko, and several athletes who are part of the national youth team.
He's over fifty. But what he's accomplished seems to him to be only a small part of what was intended and remains to be accomplished. However, Shtukman doesn't like to make advances. The embodiment of ideas into clearly tangible results of work - that's his criterion for evaluation.
Thus began one of us, returning from Voronezh, his essay on Shtukman. But the other stopped him:
"I have a feeling that you've decided to use only blue and pink colors. And Shtukman is a complex and contradictory individual. Why do you think, for several years, this truly intelligent and experienced coach, with his laboratory and his 'products,' was, so to speak, in semi-disgrace, and the attitude of our Federation's leadership toward him was, to put it mildly, cautious! You mentioned the names Lyukhina and Pervushina. Yes, there was Tamara Lyukhina, and she was confidently promised the laurels of Latynina's successor: graceful and petite, like a porcelain figurine, gifted by nature not only with agility and strength, but also with a quality that cannot be cultivated. Let's call it 'charm,' let's call it 'magic.' Call it whatever you want, but I remember when Lyukhina ran up before a vault, looking at the soft, cat-like movements of her left palm - even that was pure enchantment."
"There was Irina Pervushina - an explosive, strange style, an unusual, mask-like face, difficult to reconcile with the turbulent temperament of the floor exercise. She was also a master of the extra class."
"And so both of them - Lyukhina and Pervushina - left the stage prematurely, without having fulfilled their potential, without having fully revealed their talents, due to serious injuries. It's strange, however, that public opinion placed all the blame for what happened on the coach, on Shtukman!"
"I can cite dozens of examples of athletes whose persistent minor injuries prevented them from achieving greatness. What was Shtukman blamed for? For the fact that his students didn't become Olympic champions? Or perhaps it boils down to something else? Perhaps, during a period when individual bricks began to fall from the wall of our gymnasts' superiority on the international stage, they were too hasty in looking for someone to blame? You didn't mention that both Lyukhina and Pervushina contributed to the Soviet gymnastics gold medals. Lyukhina was an Olympic champion in the team competitions in both Rome and Tokyo. Pervushina was the 1962 world champion on the uneven bars. Yes, everyone wanted more victories. So what if it doesn't work out? In sports, luck sometimes plays a role. And when Pervushina got injured, it all started: Shtukman, they say, is cruel. He drove the girls to exhaustion, exhausting them with backbreaking work. But I can tell you that to speak like that about Yuri Eduardovich is to misunderstand his methods. I attended his training sessions and, you know, I'm amazed by his thought process, his constant search for new elements, his desire to keep up with the times. He's not satisfied with repeating the same old stuff. Shtukman admitted that he's excited by all the advances in science and technology. He sees himself as part of a powerful movement toward progress. The desire to create, to design something new, is embodied in the original exercises they're training in Voronezh. That's a company secret. But I can assure you that soon more than one fifteen-year-old Lyuba Burda will enter the big (and, in all likelihood, international) gymnastics arena."
"However, what has been said is still not a refutation. You say that Shtukman sees himself as part of progress. True, but that explains his haste. The stories of Lyukhina and Pervushina would not have resonated so loudly if they had not been aligned with Yuri Eduardovich's theoretical views. These views are precisely formulated in his transcript, which I will quote: "If they tell me: 'do only the old, but do it purely,' I'll change my profession. You have to create, you have to take risks... You have to increase the difficulty..." Shtukman is a zealous proponent of increasing the difficulty of elements, coupled with early specialization. He takes tiny girls into his school, setting a firm goal - to produce a world champion - and imposes on them risky workloads that others (I'm referring to his opponents) find unbearable. The clouds that temporarily clouded Yuri Eduardovich's reputation are rumors and speculation that Lyukhina and Pervushina fell victim to excessive demands. I say "rumors and speculation" because I don't know (and who could know!) how much truth there is in all this. But what's done is done, and you can't take words back."
"Why talk about 'a grain of truth,' and why all this gloom? Let's tell the whole truth, and it's simple: both Lyukhina and Pervushina are now quite healthy, studying, working, and - I'm convinced - having forgotten their failures, they are grateful to their teacher for those years of intense enjoyment that sport provides. And now, to reinforce my point, I want to talk a little about days long past."
...In 1948, a young coach, Yuri Shtukman, arrived in devastated Voronezh. As a child, his body had been crippled by a serious illness, but his powerful spirit had made him an athlete, and the struggle between body and spirit had shaped his indomitable, fanatical character. The city greeted those returning from the war with the gloomy cold of the gaping windows of burnt-out buildings. Shtukman began his training in the gymnasium of a technical school, miraculously preserved from the bombings. The gymnastics apparatus was a joke. Four men held the balance beam steady. The bars, wrapped in bandages, groaned with age and cracked loudly in the frosty air of the gym.
"For some reason, it was during this period that the idea of creating a specialized sports school took root in me," Shtukman recounts. "I wanted to work to the point of exhaustion, but the conditions were simply unavailable. Gyms, gyms - that was the number one problem. In fact, only a year ago did the Spartak sports school acquire a gym. All these years, I trained girls without really having a permanent home - that is, a well-equipped gym. Naturally, at first, my desire was to produce a truly excellent gymnast, but then I gradually became engrossed in inventing new elements - my own, fresh ones. I felt I simply couldn't repeat the same thing over and over again. Our gymnasts' initial victories led to a prolonged rehashing of routines repeated year after year. Creative exploration stalled. Back in 1958, at the World Championships in Moscow, I was amazed by the vast array of elements possessed by the very young Caslavska. Then I was finally convinced that the development of gymnastics must take a new path, based on the creation of original elements, on risk."
"I am very sorry that we did not unite in our joint searches, did not develop a common point of view on fundamental issues, and often disagreed on minor details..."
This is Shtukman's concept. Yes. Now we say we have a Shtukman school, that he was one of the few coaches who keenly grasped the spirit of the times, that he was one of the first to put his idea into practice. I'd even say that Yuri Eduardovich helped women's gymnastics break free from its impasse. After all, at one point it seemed that the reservoir of elements accumulated by gymnasts since the XV Olympic Games had been exhausted. The athletes' standarized combinations differed only in the order in which they were performed. And them Shtukman, using Lyuba Burda, as an example, demonstrated that it was possible to devise new, original combinations. Burda, who fell asleep one evening unknown and woke up the next morning famous, performed something on the unevenbars that defies description - flying off the bars, she spun her tiny body around three times (!) and once again gripped the polished wood with her palms. The world had never seen anything like it.
"You're right - events have shown that Shtukman, before anyone else in our country, found the fastest gymnastic time, which today has revealed to us, perhaps, the best fruit of Yuri Eduardovich's efforts - Lyuba Burda. Shtukman, as it turns out, knew and understood everything in advance. But why did he remain in the shadows for so long?"
We have a natural, albeit offensive, tradition. The coach who works with the national team is highly regarded. And he works with the national team mainly when he has his own students in the main squad. Exceptions are rare. For example, the current involvement of such an intelligent, highly erudite, and dynamic specialist as Vladimir Smirnov in training the Olympic team seems to be a very wise move on the part of the Federation. But some time ago, Smirnov was almost written off because his student, Polina Astakhova, was ending her athletic career.
The same thing happened to Shtukman. Neither his experience, nor his imagination, nor his judgement disappeared. But the stars don't rise every year. And for a long time, everything he had accumulated remained only in Voronezh...
"Perhaps there's nothing unnatural about the fact that, after Pervushina and Lyukhina retired, Shtukman 'locked himself away' in his laboratory and, bit by bit, amassed his wealth. But when the accumulation process was complete, the cup overflowed and spilled onto the gymnastics platform as a new creation of Shtukman's - Lyuba Burda. Remember all the talk about her? At fourteen, she showed off unique routines! Wasn't that too early? The old story resurfaced, people were indignant - Shtukman would ruin the girl. But then they took a closer look, and no, everything was fine - the girl wasn't worn out, she was cheerful. Apparently, Shtukman was lucky to have stumbled upon such a natural. Yes, Lyuba is gifted, but no natural ability will fully develop in inept, calloused hands. And Yuri Eduardovich, in this sense, is a master of all trades, a jack of all trades, with a brilliant understanding of psychology - in changing what I consider to be an outdated system of training Masters. After all, coaches generally follow this path: they teach a gymnast some 'iron' routine, and then refine it and incorporate difficult elements. But Shtukman did the opposite: he came up with his own routines, spectacular routines - and used all of this as a foundation. But, really, how difficult it was to prove that the method of early specialization is acceptable in gymnastics!"
"Yes, it's not that easy to prove. Moreover, it's far from proven. Frankly, the fact that we have Shtukman is both the joy and the bane of our gymnastics. An inventor, a magician, a sorcerer, he is the idol of a huge number of coaches in our vast country. But as the saying goes, 'Don't make yourself an idol.' There are people - and there are so few of them - who perceive Yuri Eduardovich's ideas speculatively, in the most superficial form. Take a little girl (the smaller the better), give her lots of higher difficulty groups (she won't be afraid of anything in her youth), and lo and behold, a world champion is ready, and you are the champion's coach. Shtukman himself backs up the implementation of his ideas with pure searching, high culture, and fanaticism, while other 'micro-Shtukmans' are driven by nothing more than fanaticism or, worse, a simple desire to quickly get ahead. And the children suffer. They are traumatized - physically and emotionally - and they live within the four walls of the gym, seeing nothing else."
This is where the controversy and contradiction lie in what Yuri Eduardovich Shtukman, one of the most brilliant gymnastics teachers, brings to gymnastics. His successes are fundamental. And so are his failures.
V. GOLUBEV
S. TOKAREV