Olga Korbut

Olga Valentinovna Korbut was born on 16 May 1955, the youngest of four daughters in a working-class family in Belarus.

Olga was the shortest girl in her class, and at the age of 11, she decided to prove she was just as good – if not better – at gymnastics than her taller classmates. The “Little Sparrow” (as the Russians called her) began training four or five hours a day.

After a year of training with 1964 Olympic gold medalist Yelena Volchetskaya, the head of the Grodno children’s sports school No. 3, Renald Knysh, selected her as a possible future star of the gymnastics team and took over as her coach and trainer.

When she was 14. Knysh entered Olga in a Russian national championship. The minimum age for entrants was 16, but they made an exception for Olga. She didn’t win, but finished in a very high position. A year later. she won her first gold medal at another championship.

Aged just 17, she went on to world acclaim and became the star of the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, when she skipped, danced, flipped, balanced and somersaulted her way to three gold and one silver medal, despite a fall on the uneven parallel bars dropping her to seventh overall in the all-around individual placings.

Olga was the darling of the fans and the media for her courage to try new moves (and her willing smile). She became the first gymnast to perform a backflip to catch on the uneven bars. In her honour the move has since become known as the “Korbut Flip”.

Confirming her daring nature, she was also the first to do a backward somersault on the beam.

At the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, she was overshadowed by Romanian prodigy Nadia Comâneci’s astonishing “perfect 10” score. Nonetheless, Korbut still won the gold medal in the team event and a silver on the balance beam.

Korbut retired from competition in 1977 and later settled in Atlanta, Georgia (USA). In 2017, she sold her 1972 and 1976 Olympic medals, among 32 lots (including two golds and a silver from the Munich Olympics), which fetched $333,500.

In 1999, she spoke out about the sexual assault and rape she had suffered at the hands of her coach, Renald Knysh, which he denied.

Several other gymnasts, who had also trained under Knysh, came forward to reveal their own similar experiences of sexual assault. Knysh died in Grodno in April 2019, at the age of 87.