How Olga Korbut Inspired My Life

The most I could ever do was a handstand, a roundoff, the splits and a front summer sault. I was never going to the Olympics. I tried a front flip once in my neighbor’s backyard while we played “Olympics” that very summer. I landed with a thud on my back and for the first and only time in my life, had the breath knocked out of me. I could not breathe. I could not speak. I just laid there. My sisters and friends did not notice. I just laid there on the Zoisha grass in complete terror, and then my lungs filled as I gasped for a full breath of air.

        It wasn’t just Olga’s gymnasatic abilities that inspired me, it was her humanness in face of such triumph and tragedy.

      I watched her routines at the 1972 Olympics on TV and now rewatched them on You Tube. She was the unifying force in a world where the US were against Russiansa and the Russians against the US. Suddenly, we were all for Olga. My 10-year-old self could not understand why we “hated” the Russians in the first place. They were simply people.

      People…we are all flawed, we each have abilities, we each have things we laugh at, we cry at, we mourn, we celebrate…so why do we fight? She made me want to be the Unifier in a time when girls/women were not celebrated.

       1972 is a long ass time ago, isn’t it? The feeling stays as if it were yesterday. I wish still to be a Unifier, and a Connector. In Mary’s Utopia, we would all get along, seeking to understand the other rather than see the other as enemy or obstacle.

       I love My Utopia. It only lives in my heart and with a few other souls who wish for the same. It’s my Reset when I’ve spent time in “Resentment Land.” It grows when I am around my young students. They are so giving with their praise, their emotions both up and down, and with their unending creativity. I am so thankful to back in their world again.

       Hey, I can still do the front splits. I haven’t tried a handstand since I was in my teens, but this may be the year I do. Olga Korbut, thank you for inspiring me then and now, to stretch, to practice, to and to unify.