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.), which increased pressure on Soviet gymnasts to return to winning competitions,
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. 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. She was predicted to be a possible contender at the upcoming 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow.
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.
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 was dangerous enough to potentially cause major injuries, she was pushed to keep the element in her floor routine, and she continued to practice it, even knowing it was a dangerous element.
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.
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. 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.
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: