Kateryna Serebrianska

Kateryna Serebrianskaya^[a] (born 25 October 1977 in Simferopol) is a former Individual Rhythmic Gymnast. She was born in Simferopol, in the Ukrainian SSR of the Soviet Union - in present day Ukraine. She started gymnastics in 1982 at age 4, her mother Liubov was her coach, at the Gratsia club in Simferopol. After that she went to the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, to train at the Deriugins School. Kateryna retired from Rhythmic Gymnastics in 1998. She is 178 cm / 5.8 ft in height.

Career

Kateryna tied Bulgaria's Maria Petrova for the all-round title at the 1995 world championships in Vienna, Austria. She also won several individual apparatus titles : rope in the 1993 World Rhythmic Gymnastics Championships in Alicante, Spain; hoop (tied with Belarusian Larissa Lukyanenko & Bulgarian Maria Petrova), ball (tied with Ukrainian teammate Olena Vitrychenko), clubs and ribbon in the 1994 World Rhythmic Gymnastics Championships in Paris, France; ball (tied with Russians Yanina Batyrchina and Amina Zaripova) in the 1995 Worlds in Vienna, Austria; and again in 1996 in Hungary. She also won the 1996 European all-round title, together with the team gold, and gold on rope, ball and ribbon finals.

In the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, she dazzled the audience with her technically brilliant routines, and although she had a slight fumble with the ribbon before her final toss, her technical brilliance and clean execution assured her of the gold medal. She was comfortably leading her closest rival, Russia's Yanina Batyrchina by 0.150 points going into that ribbon routine, and the latter was up first and dropped the ribbon.

In addition, Serebrianskaya, Kabayeva, Olexandra Tymoshenko and Yevgeniya Kanayeva were the only rhythmic gymnast to win a World, European and Olympic championships in their entire career.

In 1997, she had a gargantuan task of defending both her European and World Championships all-round titles, being the reigning European, World and Olympic all-round champion like her fellow Ukrainian female artistic gymnastics counterpart, Lilia Podkopayeva. In the 1997 European Championships in Greece, she dropped a club right at the end of her all-round clubs routine (9.825), but scores of 9.950 on both the rope and ribbon, and a 9.912 on hoop gave her an accumulated score of 29.637, hence the bronze medal by a mere 0.012 ahead of French competitor, Eva Serrano. In the apparatus finals, she managed to win the gold in the rope event with a perfect 10.000, and took silver in the clubs and ribbon events. She did not compete in the 1997 World Championships due to an illness suffered by her mother. In her final major competition, the 1998 European Championships, she merely made it into each of the apparatus final events, but won the gold in the hoop final (9.950), a silver with rope (9.933) and a bronze with ribbon (9.933), and actually tied with the same score as two of her fellow competitors, Evgenia Pavlina of Belarus and Yanina Batyrchina of Russia, but was placed 3rd due to the new tie-breaker scoring system. She placed a creditable 6th (lost in the tie-breaker to Belarusian, Yulia Raskina) in the all-round final.

Records

1. Serebrianskaya became the first female rhythmic gymnast to hold the European, World, and Olympic all-round titles at the same time. This record was tied by Alina Kabayeva at the 2004 Athens Olympics.

2. She was the first gymnast who has won gold medals in all of apparatus in a World Championship(5 apparatus, rope, hoop, ball, clubs and ribbon). Evgenia Kanaeva tied this record in 2011.

3. She levels with Evgenia Kanaeva and Lilia Ignatova in ball: all of them have won 3 gold medals in the World Championships.

Notes and references

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