Oksana Chusovitina

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Olympic medal record
Women's Artistic Gymnastics
Gold	1992 Barcelona	Team competition

Oksana Aleksandrovna Chusovitina (Russian:Оксана Александровна Чусовитина)(born June 19, 1975, Bukhara, Uzbek SSR) is a gymnast competing for Germany since 2006. She was formerly a citizen of, and a competitor for, the Soviet Union (before 1993) and Uzbekistan (1993-2006).

To date, Chusovitina's career in elite gymnastics has spanned almost twenty years. She won the USSR Junior Nationals in 1988 and began competing at the senior international level in 1989, before some of her current rivals were even born.

From her earliest meets, Chusovitina's strengths were her explosive tumbling and vaulting. Her powerful style is reminiscent of former Soviet champion Stella Zakharova. Chusovitina was the vault gold medalist at the 1990 Goodwill Games; the following year she won the floor exercise gold at the 1991 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships. In 1992 Chusovitina competed at the Olympics with the Unified Team, shared in the team gold medal and competed in the floor final.

After the Olympics when the former Soviet gymnasts returned to their home republics, Chusovitina began competing for Uzbekistan. She represented Uzbekistan at the 1996, 2000, and 2004 Olympic Games. Chusovitina has competed in nine Gymnastics World Championships in 1991, 1992, 1993, 1995, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005 and 2006.

In 1997 Chusovitina married Uzbek Olympic wrestler Bakhodir Kurpanov; the couple had a son, Alisher, in 1999. In 2002, Alisher was diagnosed with leukemia. Chusovitina and her husband moved to Germany to pursue advanced medical treatment for him. She continued to represent Uzbekistan in international competitions, including the Olympics, until October 2006, when she was granted German citizenship. Her first competition for her new country was the 2006 World Gymnastics Championships.

As of 2006, Chusovitina is still active on the international competition circuit. She won a silver medal on the vault at the 2005 World Championships in Melbourne, Australia; at the 2006 Worlds, she won a bronze on vault and placed ninth in the all-around.

Chusovitina is remarkable in her ability to remain competitive for so many years, often in the face of great adversity. The national training center in Tashkent, where Chusovitina trained for many years, had antiquated, and in some cases, unsafe equipment. In spite of the poor training conditions, Chusovitina was still able to produce world-class routines.

Chusovitina is the only female gymnast ever to participate in four Olympics. She also holds the record for the gymnast with the most World-Championship medals on a single apparatus (8 on vault). She is also one of only a handful of women, along with Cuban Leyanet Gonzalez and Soviet legend Larissa Latynina, to return to high-level gymnastics and international competition after becoming a mother.

[edit] Skills

• Floor Exercise: Chusovitina is credited as being the first woman to successfully perform a layout-full out on FX. She has won world titles on this event. Her music for floor routines was:
  • 1991: "Guillaume Tell" by Gioacchino Rossini
  • 1992: "Triumphal March" from Spartacus by Aram Khachaturyan

• Vault: Chusovitina is renowned as a vault specialist. Interestingly, she is the only top female vaulter in the world who does not perform Yurchenko style vaults. Instead, she competes only front entry and Tsukahara-family vaults. She currently performs the handspring laid-out Rudi (which is named after her in the Code of Point) and the Tsukahara with 3/2 twist.

[edit] External links

• Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique profile for Oxana Chusovitina
• In Our Spotlight - intlgymnast.com
• List of competitive results
• Official Team UZB page
• Report on the Tashkent gym