Sovetsky Sport. February 9, 1958. It was last spring. At the USSR Cup in Kiev, Shakhlin, Titov, and Shaginyan were locked in a fierce battle for first place. It was impossible to predict who would emerge victorious. Everyone performed very evenly, confidently. And suddenly, toward the end of the competition, Shakhlin felt the moment for a decisive blow had arrived. His opponents had each lost one or two tenths of a point on various apparatuses. The opportunity to pull away from his rivals could not be ignored.
As soon as the last gymnast finished their routine, Shakhlin, without a second's hesitation, jumped onto the bar and performed several gymnastics moves. This was an extraordinary test of strength before the final routine.
Finally, the judges call on Shakhlin to perform his routine for evaluation. The gymnast grabbed the bar tightly, gained momentum with a sweeping movement, and soared upward. One rotation followed another. Shakhlin crossed his hands, flipped mid-air and finally, with powerful swings, released his hands and flew like a swallow. The audience applauded the gymnast. He outscored his competitors, chief among them the young athlete and Merited Master of Sports Titov, and won the Cup.
We recalled this episode during a conversation with Boris Shakhlin and asked him to talk in more detail about gymnastics tactics.
"I didn't immediately learn what tactics were," Shakhlin said. "About five years ago, as a young master, I prepared for competitions in a very monotonous manner. I didn't take many things into account. You're allotted ten minutes to warm up before going on the apparatus. To build confidence, I'd run through the entire routine twice. Before the competition ended, I'd lose my freshness, my strength was low and, naturally, my performance quality declined."
"Later, I realized that warm-ups only require repetition of individual sequences. Even the day before a competition, during the so-called 'testing of equipment' I now only perform what I'm really good at, for my own enjoyment, to get myself in the right frame of mind."
"I don't like 'voting' (asking the judges permission to repeat a routine while discarding the score from the first attempt), of course, unless no one has beaten me and it's not clear who the most likely contender is. In such a situation, even if the judges give me a score two- or three-tenths of a point less than my highest score, I settle for it, saving my energy for the final round, and I don't want to risk anything in vain. The second attempt may be even more unsuccessful, and then you can say that all is lost."
"Tactical tasks have to be addressed long before the competition begins. While perfecting my optional routines, I constantly compare them with the routines I expect my main competitors to perform. And if I know that at a recent competition in my city, one of them demonstrated a very impressive routine on some apparatus, significantly more difficult and beautiful than mine, then in the remaining time before the decisive competition, I try to include a new difficult element in my routine, so as not to be left in debt."
"Many gymnasts do this. For example, take Leningrad's Master of Sport Portnoi. At a city competition, he saw that athlete Znamensky had begun to end his high bar routine with a double somersault. Spectators and judges welcomed this bold innovation. Could Leningrad's strongest master, Portnoi, be unfazed by this? No. Portnoi set out to master a difficult, risky dismount, and he achieved his goal. At the recent national championship, he demonstrated it brilliantly in his optional program."
"Unfortunately, we still have many gymnasts who underestimate the importance of tactics. They attribute any failure or setback to their own or a teammate's technique. Of course, technical errors or a lack of strength and endurance will always reduce results, but this should not serve as grounds for completely denying the importance of tactics in gymnastics competitions. Anyone who thinks differently is wrong and will pay a high price for it."
"Experienced gymnasts (I judge from my own experience here) have a keen sense of each of their movements. They are confident and can predict in advance the minimum score the judges will award them. Once a gymnast has completed an exercise, they can almost infallibly determine their score. However, this isn't always the case. Even with excellent preparation, the quality of the same exercise will always improve by 0.1-0.2 points. A gymnast's task in competition is to win back those precious fractions of a point on each apparatus, which often decide the outcome of the championship, in a fierce battle with opponents. And technique, in this case, becomes secondary. If you've found a weak link in an exercise that needs strengthening, you've solved the tactical problem correctly. All that's left to do, as they say, is 'pull yourself together,' and from the very first movements you'll feel lighter and more confident; the technique will flow naturally, without any dificulty."
"Every gymnast should strive to become an excellent all-around athlete. Without this, it's difficult to achieve classification standards and compete for victory. The key to being an all-around athlete is to skillfully distribute your energy across all twelve events. Unfortunately, you have many excellent athletes who have achieved high international ranks in individual events but who finish 15th to 20th in the all-around at national championships. Their tactics are different, too. They distribute their forces in such a way as to demonstrate their top class on their signature equipment and win the event."
"We need to set ourselves a more difficult goal - to achieve success in individual events."
"An all-around athlete's self-confidence allows them to employ a wide variety of tactical approaches. At the 1955 European Cup, held in Frankfurt am Main, the Soviet Union was represented by two gymnasts - me and Merited Master of Sports Azaryan. We competed in the optional program. We competed in three events on the first day, and the other three on the second. Naturally, for us, accustomed to the heavy workload of competition, it wasn't difficult to demonstrate all the routines in full, both during the warm-up and in front of the judges for evaluation. In was a good tactical maneuver. It forced our opponents to exploit our advantage long before the end of the competition. If anyone tried to follow our tactics, he could not withstand the load and at the end of the competition was forced to abandon the stubborn fight."
"Team performances force even more thought into tactics. It's not a matter of indifference who performs his exercise first. Therefore, the strongest members of the team are given a special role. They are often entrusted with performing the exercise first, to set a good example for the others. They also finish the team's performance to bridge any gaps created by the failure of one member."