Sovetsky Sport. February 5, 1978. Shyness might well have prevented him from initiating that conversation, were it not for his wife.
"Veronika Vladimirovna and I are, after all, still a little hesitant about whether it is worth writing about us... It doesn't seem to us to be the most suitable moment."
On the one hand, Ruslan Spiridonovich Lavrov is a Merited Coach of the USSR who trained the Olympic gymnastics champion Svetlana Grozdova. On the other hand, however, the Olympic champion (a team gold medal) missed nearly the entire past year due to surgery and is only just now - ahead of the new season - regaining her form; moreover, it remains unclear how the season will unfold. Furthermore, among her peers at Lavrov's Rostov school, no standout talents are currently visible, while those in whom he does discern potential are still in the first grade - meaning their time is a long way off.
We write about a coach when a student has excelled. This implies that the methodology is sound, the innovations are evident, and the developmental process is well-established - the coach's own persona is, as it were, realized through the titles won by the student. On the face of it, this seems entirely correct. A leading fitter earns his share of newspaper fame primarily for his labor - for overfulfilling the production plan; that is the true basis for the recognition, rather than the mere fact that he happens to be a good person or, say, a butterfly collector.
There are plans and protocols for training Masters of Sport - and these must be fulfilled - yet Masters are not finished components; just as children are not raw material, nor are youths merely semi-finished products. The true magnitude of Viktor Ilyich Alekseev's life's work lies not merely - or even primarily - in the medals and records forged by his school, but rather in the fact that, among its alumni, there are forty-six holders of doctoral and advanced academic degrees.
His name first came to prominence some three or four years ago in connection with Grozdova's routine on the balance beam. Many of the elements featured therein were not only fundamentally novel but - more importantly- through their apparent paradoxical nature, revealed the true essence of the apparatus: a device for equilibrium and balancing, rather than merely an acrobatic tumbling strip set upon legs.
In gymnastics - as in certain kinds of disciplines - there are coaches who act as inventors, and others who serve as...continuators - developers, so to speak, of their colleagues' innovations. The latter achieve success just as frequently - if not moreso - than the former, particularly given that a gift for technical invention is merely one potential facet of the multifaceted talent of a sports educator. Yet where would the world of gymnastics be without our own homegrown inventors - figures such as Yuri Shtukman and Renald Knysh?
Lavrov is cut from the same cloth. Back when he was a kayaker, he would politely grill his coach with questions about the exact angle at which the paddle blade should enter the water - and why. "I would have figured it out on my own, but I didn't have a speedometer on my boat."
He possesses visual memory and spatial imagination to an exceptional degree. he closes his eyes and, on his mental screen, replays a real-world configuration he has scrutinized down to the minutest detail. Then - a freeze-frame, followed by reflection: why must it necessarily be this way, and not otherwise - in a different plane, in a different direction? Invention is the rejection of dogma; the airplane was conceived by the one who refuted the notion that the wings must flap like those of a bird.
But a director's imagination is nothing without the talent of a performer: a specific talent capable of bringing precisely these ideas to life. It took the dark-browed girl's astonishing flexibility and coordination, her strong and dexterous hands - a legacy, perhaps, of her father, a foreman of masons, and her mother, a mason with a reputation as a jeweler. Thus was born Grozdova's little miracle - a routine in which the body weaves living lace on a beam, above it, and in the air to the sides.
Grozdova was noticed in 1974; people began to talk about her. But then she started losing weight - catastrophically - and no one could understand the cause of this mysterious endocrine disorder; indeed, even today, no one knows for certain what it was. Ruslan and Veronika fought for her life for seven months, enlisting the aid first of Rostov's medical community, and later that of the capital; they spent those seven months at her bedside, watching in horror as the living skeleton used her hands to lift one leg over the other.
She pulled through. She returned to the gym. She even managed to get back into shape before the Olympics - as much as she possibly could. She was selected for the team primarily (let's be honest) for her unique prowess on the balance beam - they were hoping for a medal. That hope went unfulfilled, however; the lingering effects of her illness took their toll.
Can we, however, assume that Lavrov's inegnuity has failed to yield him greater moral dividends thus far solely due to an unfortunate confluence of circumstances? I believe not - there is another reason at play here. Deliberateness; caution. It is a trait that reflects - if you will - his very philosophy of life. The mastery of new skills proceeds unhurriedly, under conditions of the strictest safety netting and with absolute minimum of risk. And since risk is, in any case, inevitable on the competitive platform, measures of "self-defense" - so to speak - are prepared well in advance.
Ruslan Lavrov hates pain.
One day he caught a cold, and his wife took his place, teaching the little ones a new element on the uneven bars. Veronika - herself a former student of his, and a hydraulic engineer by profession - had been working as Rostelmash but has returned to the gym to assist her husband... "Later," Lavrov recounts, "I came in and asked the girl to demonstrate what she had learned; instead, she took a nasty bump and burst into tears. It turned out that Veronika Vladimirovna had been padding the bar with a small foam cushion - something I hadn't known. I had caused the child pain; I had reduced her to tears! Yet gymnastics ought to bring children joy. Children should blossom during their training sessions... Whenever I see a coach kick someone out of the gym for being inattentive, I feel ready to walk right up to that coach and - pardon my language - give them a smack on the back of the head. If a child is inattentive, it simply means *you* have been inattentive with them."
While I was in Lavrov's gym, a track-and-field specialist was teaching six-year-olds how to run, using the uprights as hurdles. He had set them a bit too high, and a little girl banged her leg. Lavrov immediately went over to intervene, summoning every ounce of sternness he could muster.
Once you have seen him, you will remember him forever. On his pale face, beneath a boyish fringe, lie enormous eyes - made to seem even larger by the dark circles beneath them. In them resides the deep, quiet stillness of total understanding. It is the gaze of a man who suffered and grew hardened, yet ultimately prevailed and overcame. The fascists beat him in the Rostov Gestapo headquarters, while at night, his cellmates were led away to face the firing squad. He was seventeen years old; he had befriended those who had gone underground, and the Gestapo sought the key - but never found it. They deported him to Germany - and he escaped...
"Being beaten with a whip isn't frightening. It's worse when they use a rubber hose filled with sand - the pain reverberates through your entire body. If they beat you with a shovel, you have to brace yourself so that the blow lands with the handle - not the blade; I once had one snap right across my back."
Stepa the dog lives at Lavrov's school. Some cruel drunkard had hurled him into a furnace; Lavrov found him half-dead and rushed him to a hospital - one eye had to be removed, and the other was left half-blind. Ruslan brings him food, which the dog faithfully earns his keep by guarding. At night, he scares off intruders with a booming bass, and in the summer - at the school's camp on the Black Sea coast - he chases away jackals. Dogs, as a rule, take after their owners: back there by the sea, Stepa used to nurse stray kittens; here - right under my nose - he brought, himself a foster child, a homeless puppy. He was a perfect little wheeler-dealer in the living room. We named him Filka.
Lavrov read Thompson Seton aloud to his girls, and the young ladies began to look at nature with new eyes. "The soul," he would say, "must develop."
His father dreamed that he would become a forester, his mother that he would become an artist; yet in a teacher, both - the one and the other - must be combined.
In this room no one shouts - people speak softly, though they laugh loudly. In his youngest group, they laugh with all nine voices: Inna, Ella, Anzhela, Ira, the two Olgas, and the three Natashas. He treats them like adults; he doesn't talk down to them. He believes that if you speak to children using that artificial "baby talk" - to which we adults are so prone - they merely look puzzled, and then proceed to mock us. "Children understand everything - metaphors, jokes, subtle hints; they gravitate toward such things. For them, perhaps, it serves as mental gymnastics."
Once the junior group had been selected and formed, he was afraid to begin working with them. He had been shy since childhood, at times suffering from what felt like truly agonizing bouts of social paralysis. During his studies at the physical education college, when he was required to conduct a lesson for his own classmates, he nearly fled the room. Consequently, whenever Grozdova is seized by one of her inexplicable fits of stubbornness - digging in her heels and butting her head against him as if against a solid wall - Lavrov understands; he endures it and gives her the space to work through it. He had become a coach as if by breaking through the barrier of his own reclusiveness - a trait exacertabed by his wartime experiences - and he cherises the people in his life, cherishes the fact that they gravitate toward him, even though - albeit very rarely now - he still occasionally feels the need to retreat along into the woods, lie down, and simply gaze up at the sky.
In short, he was more afraid of the nine girls than they were of him. Or rather - not of *them*, but of his own potential inability to connect with them. They looked up at him from below, while the words caught in his throat. Finally, he grumbles something - angrily joking at his own petrification - and, in unison, the gap-toothed mouths of Inna, Ella, Anzhela, Ira, the two Olgas, and the three Natashas stretched wide in grins from ear to ear; and just like that, they became...his.
"I was very cautious when teaching the children how to handle the air - how to jump on a trampoline, how to feel their bodies in flight. Next came somersaults. Little by little, we attempted doubles. Then I noticed that our coaches immediately threw their girls into doing doubles - without any preparation whatsoever. I called them out of the gym and, quite sharply, asked them to put an end to that recklessness... Young coaches tend to be in a hurry; in their minds, they have probably outgrown me long ago."
Upon arriving in Rostov-on-Don from Odessa - fresh from a competition featuring the country's top figure skaters - I felt particularly acutely the difference in the standing of a young professional in these two disti9nce disciplines. In figure skating, there exists a "mighty handful" of elite coaches, and breaking into this inner circle from the outside is exceedingly difficult. In gymnastics, however, anyone can be noticed, singled out, and elevated - provided they are talented, hardworking, and capable of molding a standout athlete. This situation has its own underlying causes - both subjective and objective - but that is not the point here. In this regard, the advantage, of course, lies with gymnastics. Yet therein also lies a danger: the risk of haste and mere rote drilling.
>Lavrov made a curious, albeit simple, observation. Later on, others joined the group in which Grozdova was training - talented individuals who, so to speak, had skipped over the foundational elements that she had mastered so thoroughly. Yet, as time went on, they all revealed gaps in their training; every single one of them eventually fell by the wayside. This aligns with the philosophy of Bela Karolyi - the coach who molded the Olympic all-around champion Nadia Comaneci - who maintained that the ABCs of gymnastics must be learned sequentially, letter by letter, rather than by jumping straight from A to Z.
Talk of "acceleration" is currently in vogue, even in the world of gymnastics, and to some, Lavrov's views might appear outdated. Yet it was no mere coincidence that he immediately took to heart the concept for a new floor exercise routine for Grozdova - a concept put forward by choreographer Aida Selezneva and composer Evsey Vevrik. The piece is Glinka's I Remember a Wonderous Moment - a work in which the central theme is suddenly interrupted, even slashed through, by bursts of grotesque, modern rhythms, only to re-emerge once more, ultimately triumphant. This magnificent romance - inspired by the greatest lines of love in all the world: those of Pushkin - symbolizes here not only the principle of harmony standing in opposition to discord, but, above all, the eternal contending against the accidental and the superficial. It symbolizes the victory of goodness and beauty.
Svetlana hasn't yet learned to execute this routine properly, but she has - in my opinion - learned to understand it.
She demonstrated it; then the training session ended, and she began tidying up the gym, meticulously arranging the mats corner to corner. She is a meticulous and hardworking young woman - the daughter of Khristofor Grozdov, a Merited Builder of the RSFSR - in whose home one walks on the floors only barefoot, and where not a single speck of dust is to be found.
I asked, "Svetlana, what is the most important thing about your coaches?" She cast a stern glance from beneath her rounded, Byzantine-style eyebrows and, with an air of great gravity, replied: "That they'll never leave you in the lurch."
Who knows - perhaps the lessons taught by Pushkin and Glinka, by a love for nature and - most importantly - by those seven months during which Ruslan and Veronika battled death for her life...perhaps these lessons are no less important than the most exquisite routine on the balance beam.
S. TOKAREV