Picture perfect

`WHEN I get home there will be a big party,' she said after winning her gold medal at the last Olympic Games. `People will carry me through the town. First, I would like lots of compliments and next, lots of flowers.'

Thus the new diva of gymnastics announced her nature to the world. This was Svetlana Khorkina, who won the asymmetric bars. Khorkina has not been idle since then: she is the current world and European champion and has also posed for Russian Playboy magazine. She did this, she explained loftily, to demonstrate to the world that women's gymnastics is a sport for women. The pictures put the matter beyond doubt. Although the Russian magazine lacks the gynaecological obsessions of the Western version - the lady is clad, but negligently unbuttoned - the facts of human adult sexual dimorphism cannot be ducked.

Khorkina is not only a woman, but a tall one, almost a giant by gymnastic standards. The sport is, by its nature, easier for the tiny: try to imagine Frank Bruno turning a back somersault and you will understand the biomechanics.

You would never mistake Khorkina for a shot-putter, but you might easily mistake her for a run-of-the-mill woman, or rather for a run-of-the-mill diva. She believes she is a star and every nuance of her body language expresses that conviction. She has cultivated a walk that looks as if her toes were doing the ground a favour. She has a scowl that blisters paint and a way of looking through people that makes them doubt their own existence.

Khorkina is five foot five, and looks six foot three. She will be strutting her stuff in Glasgow this weekend in an event in the Grand Prix series and, as usual, she will either be perfection or will collapse in a heap of limbs, rather like one of those tenfoot-wide Japanese spider crabs that cannot support their own limbs when out of water.

The odd thing about her is that she is suitable only for perfection; competence is beyond her. She is either perfect, or she is nothing. This is partly due to her extraordinary shape. No, not the bits of her so dashingly revealed for Playboy, but the legs. The cliche about legs going up to armpits is, in her case, more or less the truth.

With so much more body-length than her rivals, Khorkina has a tiny margin for error, yet she must perform moves of the same official degree of difficulty as the rest. The hardest piece of apparatus for her is the asymmetric bars. Oddly, this is her speciality. She was told as an unstoppably growing child that she had better give up and take the soft option of rhythmic gymnastics, but she insisted on sticking with the primary discipline.

She won her championships by putting together four very strong routines uncharacteristic because she normally does the spider-crab collapse at least once per competition. When she hits a move right, no one in the world could make it look better.

But it is not in her build, or for that matter her nature, to make a small mistake. The point of Khorkina is that she has the ability of all truly great competitors: she has made her most obvious weakness into her greatest strength.

Copyright Spectator Oct 24, 1998
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved