MOSCOW: The gymnast whose career record for most Olympic medals was broken by Michael Phelps says she doesn’t mind that the American swimmer has surpassed her mark.
Larisa Latynina, who won 18 medals in the 1956, 1960 and 1964 Olympics while competing for the Soviet Union, was at the Aquatics Center in London on Tuesday to watch Phelps, and she says she was happy for him.
“I saw him swim, and I saw my record swim away,” she tells The Associated Press in a telephone interview.
The 77-year-old adds: “He’s very talented — no doubt about that.”
The Soviet gymnast was raised by a single mother amid the Second World War. Her father died at the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943 when she was 9. Latynina has ballet background and took classes in her hometown of Kherson but had to give it up when her ballet teacher left town.
Latynina comes from an age when gymnastics was about femininity and maturity rather than teenage acrobatics which has dominated the sport for several decades.
Latynina debuted at the age of 19 and won her last medal at the 1964 Games in Tokyo when she was nearly 30 — unusually late for gymnastics which has been a teenage sport for the past decades. Three-time Olympic medalist Nadia Comaneci, who’s been described at the best female gymnast in history, retired in 1981 when she was 20.
Latynina said that she doesn’t regret that her record was broken because Phelps deserved it.
“He did a great job. As an athlete, I could only be happy to see that there is such a talented athlete out there who was able to break that record,” she said. “But I feel sorry that such a talented athlete wasn’t born in Russia.”
The Soviet gymnast still retains a bunch of records. She’s still the only woman to have won 9 gold medals.
Latynina’s fame peaked at a time when television in the Soviet Union was practically nonexistent. Although she is revered and respected by the gymnast community at home and abroad, she is not as publicly visible as Comaneci and younger gymnasts.
Russian record-holder says she’s happy for Phelps
