Elena Vyacheslavovna Mukhina (; first name sometimes rendered "Yelena", last name sometimes rendered "Muchina"; 1 June 196022 December 2006) was a Soviet gymnast who won the all-around title at the 1978 World Championships in Strasbourg, France. Her career was on the rise, and she was widely touted as the next great gymnastics star until 1979, when she broke a leg and missed several competitions. The rushed recovery from that injury, combined with pressure to master a dangerous and difficult tumbling move (the Thomas salto) caused her to break her neck two weeks before the opening of the 1980 Summer Olympics, leaving her permanently quadriplegic.
Early life Elena Mukhina was born 1 June 1960, in Moscow. She was raised by her grandmother, Anna Ivanovna after being orphaned at a young age; according to different sources, she was either orphaned at age five, or her mother died when she was three and her father left the family.
Career Mukhina took an interest in gymnastics and figure skating at an early age. When an athletic scout visited her school, she eagerly volunteered to try out for gymnastics. She later joined the CSKA Moscow sports club and was eventually inducted into the CSKA Hall of Fame.
Through 1975, Mukhina was largely unnoticed as a gymnast. Then, two separate incidents brought her to the forefront for the Soviet team. Firstly was the Romanian domination of the Soviet gymnasts at the 1976 Olympics. For this, the director for Soviet women's gymnastics, Larisa Latynina, was blamed but responded, "it's not my fault that Nadia Comăneci was not born in the Soviet Union.". This increased pressure on Soviet gymnasts to return to winning competitions. Secondly was Mukhina's transition to working with men's coach .
Klimenko had not worked with girls before, but Mukhina's previous coach, Alexander Eglit, encouraged him to consider her. Klimenko was impressed by her intelligence and coordination and began training her. In a 1978 profile, Mukhina described herself as someone who wanted to perform advanced acrobatics but was scared of them and often cried when Klimenko began teaching her new elements.
She participated in the 1975 Spartakiad and, after a poor landing, suffered a spinal injury that made her unable to turn her head. She was supposed to wear a cervical collar to recover, but Klimenko daily brought her from the hospital to the gym to train without it. Mukhina was reportedly afraid to disclose injuries to her coach and would hide them from him. She once dislocated her thumb and continued training through intense pain after repositioning it herself, and on another occasion, she won a competition after having received a concussion, stimulating herself with smelling salts.
Mukhina won the 1976 Soviet junior championships, though she did not qualify as a member of the Olympic team.
Throughout her early career, Mukhina was given multiple different birth years. She was described as being 15 in an October 1974 article in Krasnaya Zvezda, the official newspaper of the Soviet military, implying she was born in 1959. However, in March 1976, Sovetsky Sport, the official Soviet sports newspaper, published the national gymnastics teams and gave her a birth year of 1961, as did both domestic and foreign articles describing her appearances in gymnastics meets over the next few months. Late in 1976, Soviet sources began to give her birth year as 1960, the year that is engraved on her headstone.
In 1977, at the 1977 European Championships, she won silver and the all-around and three event titles in the balance beam, uneven bars, and floor exercise finals, along with a bronze medal on vault. She also placed second at the Soviet championships. Later in the year, she competed at the USSR Cup. There she ruptured her Achilles tendon and continued competing against medical advice, and she won the all-around silver medal.
The next year, she won the all-around at the Soviet championships despite pain in her foot.
Mukhina drew notice at the 1978 World Championships in Strasbourg, France, when she won the all-around ahead of Olympic champions Nadia Comăneci and Nellie Kim. She also tied for gold in the floor exercise event final and won two silver medals on balance beam and uneven bars. At the event, she debuted three new elements: a full-twisting layout Korbut flip on the uneven bars, a tucked double back salto dismount on balance beam, and a full-twisting double back salto on floor. Mukhina was praised for combining difficult routines with a graceful and individual style. She was predicted to be a possible contender at the upcoming 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow.
In 1979, Mukhina placed fourth in the all-around at the 1979 European Championships, where she also won gold on the uneven bars and silver on the floor. This was her last major competition.
A 1978 documentary film of the Soviet national team, You are in Gymnastics () features Mukhina talking with her coach, Mikhail Klimenko, and footage of her rigorous training regimen. The film presented her as an example of a gymnast who used willpower to overcome pain.
Injury Mukhina's floor exercise tumbling passes were considered revolutionary at the time because they included a never-before seen combination salto (the "Mukhina"). In 1979, her coach wanted her to take it a step further and become one of the few female gymnasts to do an element taken from men's gymnastics, the Thomas salto (a 1½ backflip with 1½ twists ending in a forward roll, perfected by American gymnast Kurt Thomas).
Mukhina soon realized the Thomas salto was extremely dangerous, 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 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:
In 1979, while training for the 1979 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships, Mukhina, already suffering from fatigue from her workouts to the point where she struggled to cross the street in front of her gym before the pedestrian light changed, broke her leg. Due to her injury, she did not compete at the World Championships, where the Soviet women's team lost to the Romanian team, and only Nellie Kim and Stella Zakharova were able to medal. She did not want to keep competing, but Klimenko persuaded her to continue training.
With less than a year until the 1980 Summer Olympics would 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. 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. She also took furosemide, a diuretic that causes a loss of calcium, which one specialist blamed for her later accident; Mukhina denied that it significantly changed her performance, and a teammate noted that using it was extremely common among Soviet gymnasts to quickly lose weight when coaches demanded they do so.
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 had the potential to cause major injuries, she was pushed to keep the element in her floor routine.
Mukhina was sent to the pre-Olympic training camp at the Minsk Palace of Sport. She was under particular pressure as she was from Moscow, and she described herself as feeling like an animal being driven with a whip. While she wanted to be left alone, she claimed that Klimenko told her that would only happen if she crashed into the floor platform.
On 3 July 1980, at the Palace of Sport, two weeks before the Moscow Olympics, Mukhina was practising the pass containing the Thomas salto when she under-rotated the salto. She landed on her chin and broke three vertebrae in her spine, leaving her quadriplegic. Her coach Klimenko was not present, having left the day prior for Moscow to report that she had mastered the Thomas salto. She required surgery afterward. Lidiya Ivanova said that while Mukhina had not been feeling well that day, an unnamed coach at the training camp insisted that she show a floor exercise with full difficulty.
Following the injury, inconsistent information was released about the circumstances of the accident and her condition. For example, Soviet newspapers reported she had fallen during her dismount from the balance beam and had a blackout, but she then got back up to finish her floor exercise without knowing how badly she had been injured. Other Soviet reports hid the extent of her injury, saying that she was recovering well and that she could stand. The Associated Press reported on 8 July that she had been injured on a fall from the uneven bars with unknown injuries that would prevent her from competing at the Olympics, and later reporting said that she had broken her spine training a double salto on floor but that Soviet officials denied that she was paralyzed.
Soviet team coach Yuri Titov deflected inquiries about whether Mukhina would be trying for a comeback in 1984, even blaming her "injury" on attempting a skill that she "was not able to do but thought she needed to make the team [...] she suffered injury and missed her chance. [...] All the bad stories, they are not true." It was not until October 1981, more than a year after her accident, that an article in the state newspaper Pravda stated that she was paralyzed performing the Thomas salto.
Nellie Kim, a fellow Soviet gymnast who was on the 1980 Olympic team, said in a 2020 interview that while she did not witness Mukhina's accident personally, the news of it made her fearful. She was already afraid of performing several of her elements, and she decided not to continue gymnastics after the Olympics once she heard of Mukhina's injury.
Aftermath and later life
Aftermath of injury Mukhina became a recluse following the accident and rarely discussed it publicly. In one of her few interviews about the accident, published in Ogonyok magazine, she criticized the Soviet gymnastics program for valuing medals over the well-being of athletes: