“An unspent abyss of kindness remained in them”: Ivanova on the legacy of the Second World War, politics in sports and victory at any cost

“Child of war,” she calls herself.

She was born four and a half years before the start of the Great Patriotic War in Moscow, and her childhood memory preserved many details of that difficult life period.

A two-time Olympic champion, a person at 85 is amazing with activity, love of life and willingness to help others.

“I'm glad you called,” she says by way of greeting.

- I chatted here at the dacha with a neighbor, and just the occasion appeared to end the conversation.

There is a lot of work in the house and in the garden.

But I'm ready to answer, ask.

- It was always curious: where did the children of the military generation, as well as in the country that survived the Great Patriotic War, immediately after its end, suddenly open so much sports passion and charge for the result?

It wasn't before that, was it?

— Not before.

But I must say that now they go into sports from the age of four.

In my time, it was possible to enroll in the gymnastics section only from 12. Although I was very young during the war, I remember very well how we lived with my mother in the basement.

I was born in the very center of Moscow, on Polina Osipenko Street, which was renamed Sadovnicheskaya Street in 1994.

In the middle of this street was the headquarters of the Moscow Military District, where my mother worked as a cleaner.

She had two of us - me and my older brother.

When the war began, all men were called to the front, and my mother, like many other women in our country, had to somehow survive and raise children on her own.

Every morning my mother went to work, and we stayed at home.

As I remember now: a long common corridor with service apartments on both sides, one stove in the kitchen for everyone, one toilet and a huge number of people.

Cold water in the washstand and going to the common bath once a week is like a great holiday.

Now sometimes I remember all this and think: how did we even survive that time?

- Perhaps that's why they survived that they received hardening for many years to come?

Now, of course, many things cannot even be explained to the current generation.

I remember at school we ourselves lined the notebooks for penmanship.

Can you imagine a picture?

A little second-grade marmulet sits for hours and lines horizontal and oblique lines in a notebook so that the letters turn out even.

At school, I, however, could sit through a maximum of three lessons.

Then my head started spinning from hunger.

What was the food like?

In the morning a glass of tea with a piece of sugar and a piece of black bread.

Sometimes my mother managed to get a piece of butter.

In addition to her main job, she washed the general's family, and she was paid with food.

And then at some holiday at school, I saw a gymnast girl.

Absolutely incredible: it bends in different directions, makes bridges, splits ...

- And your sporting fate was decided?

“It didn't happen right away.

This same girl somehow saw me trying to roll on the grass at a summer camp and called me to the section.

I passed the selection and was very afraid that I would not be accepted into the section by age: I didn’t even look at my 11 years old then: small, knees thicker than hips - such a tiny scarecrow.

But apparently she was already cunning: when they asked how old I was, she answered that she was already 12. And instead of her own, she named her brother’s birthday so as not to get confused in her lies.

- Not confused?

— Where there!

Once I was standing upside down in the gym, the coach came up and asked: “Kalinina, when did you turn 12?”

Without thinking, I blurted out: they say, 12 is not soon yet ... But somehow it worked out, they did not expel.

When the time came, my coach Boris Evgenievich Dankevich transferred me to a higher level - to Dynamo Alexei Ivanovich Alexandrov.

And this, of course, determined my entire future destiny.

- My father told me that the post-war coaches were completely unique people, despite the fact that almost none of them had a special education.

- Absolutely true words.

It was only many years later that I began to understand that all those people who became teachers and coaches after the war felt like no one else all the suffering that it brought to the country.

Some kind of abyss of kindness remained unspent in them.

For example, I never had a dad - I never said this word to anyone in my life.

I remember how once, when I was still studying in the children's section, Dankevich said that he would come to our house in the evening.

I didn't know how to behave at all.

How to meet a coach, what to treat - after all, in my life with my mother there have never been men at all.

I then met the coach at the tram stop, we came to our house together, and he handed my mother a small cake and some other bundle tied with twine.

She unfolded it and saw that there was a children's coat - for me.

I'm telling you about it now, but everything inside is turning upside down.

I remember how my mother suddenly burst into tears when she saw that gift.

It was this absolutely incredible touchingness of relations that distinguished all our teachers of those times.

I know this for sure, because I once talked about this with Larisa Latynina, and with Tamara Manina, and with others.

- At what point in your sports life did the goal arise to achieve an outstanding result in gymnastics?

- In this regard, I was a completely illiterate comrade.

The director of our children's sports school somehow led me to a map of the world that hung in his office, and said: “See where Australia is?

It would be nice for you to go to the Olympic Games there.”

I didn’t understand what the Olympic Games were at all, but I remembered where Australia is and what it looks like.

I also thought: “Wow, how far ...”

In Dynamo, the situation was already completely different - the red carpet alone was worth something!

Almost everyone who trained there was already a member of the national team, wore training jackets with the letters “USSR”, and I somehow very quickly also joined the national team, although the competition at that time was incredibly high.

That's how it went.

Sofya Muratova, who in my eyes at that time was just a celestial, somehow invited me to her home and gave me her skirt, which immediately got the name “front” from me - and it was incredible happiness.

And when they started paying me a monthly sports scholarship of 1200 rubles, and I brought the money home and put it on the table, my mother was simply speechless.

Her eyes were such that I roughly understood what she thought of me at that moment.

And no wonder: with her salary of 300 rubles, which, moreover, was never given out at one time, she had never seen such an amount in her life.

Not to mention holding it in your hands.

And, in my opinion, until that very day, my mother did not really understand what exactly I was doing in my gym.

- Your serious gymnastic career began in those years when the USSR did not take part in any international tournaments.

- We were then closed from the world for a long time, we were behind the Iron Curtain, but I remember very well the first Olympics with the participation of Soviet athletes - in 1952 in Helsinki.

Probably because the gymnasts won nine gold medals there.

And I was already preparing for the Games in Melbourne as part of a team.

We were then taken to Tashkent for a training camp for two and a half months, where the climatic conditions were as close as possible to Australian ones, and the whole team quickly ate some insane amount of overweight kilograms.

- Tashkent, as you know, is a city of bread ...

And grape, as it turned out.

I saw grapes there for the first time in my life, especially since they settled us in a boarding house, where all the alleys were entwined with vines.

You walk, and a bulk bunch hangs over your head, covered with a bluish coating, all in drops of dew.

How can you not eat it?

When the situation with weight became catastrophic in the team, even the then sports minister Nikolai Romanov came to us.

He came to training, looked at the team, and then, apparently, gave such a boost to all the coaches that we were immediately put on a diet.

They began to weigh every day, organized a special table of “drivers”, where I sat next to the great Viktor Chukarin.

True, no one at that time understood exactly how to drive weight.

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- In terms of?

- For example, we were strictly forbidden to eat grapes, but at the same time it was allowed to drink equally high-calorie grape juice.

But somehow we managed to overcome this problem.

And flew to Australia.

Although not without difficulties.

- Which ones?

- Political.

By the time the Olympic Games began in Hungary, the uprising and related events had just ended, so political tension was felt at those Games around the Soviet team very strongly.

When I now hear that sport has never been as politicized as it is now, every time I think that people have too short a memory: there has always been politics around sports.

And I will not say that more than 50 years ago, the intensity was weaker than the current one.

In the same Melbourne, I was the youngest in the team, I looked at everything with wide eyes and, apparently, for this reason, everything was very strongly imprinted in my memory.

For example, there was such a story.

After the first day of the competition, the Soviet team took the lead, and the next day, when we drove up to the hall, I saw huge crowds.

I also thought: how cool it is when athletes are greeted like that.

But in the hall itself, not a single spectator was found in the stands - only the “sports” sector was filled.

It was completely inexplicable and somehow even shocking.

As the Soviet representative in the IOC, Konstantin Andrianov, later explained to us, one of the very rich Western people simply bought up all the tickets on the eve of the final so that the world would not see the triumph of the Russians.

So nothing in this regard in the world is changing: at all times our country has interfered with everyone.

Though under the Soviet flag, even under the Russian one.

After all, we have never been loved, just as at all times the strong have not been loved.

And not only in sports, but also in the political arena.

- I listen to you and I am perplexed: your generation has experienced so many hardships, hardships, restrictions ... And you never made it clear in a word that life, if you were born in another country, could probably be better.

“And now I don’t understand another.

When they start telling us today that we lived in some terrible Soviet time, in some terrible Soviet country.

Yes, I fully admit that in those days we were simply young and many things, due to age, were perceived in a completely different way, not the way they are now.

But after all, even after ending my active sports career, I flew around the world a lot as a coach, as a judge, I saw a lot of things.

And already in those days, I perfectly understood that there were enough problems in any country.

And that it is impossible to make judgments about some things without understanding the way of life, culture.

After all, even if we talk about the post-war hungry times that our country experienced, the amazing feeling of collectivism, the unity of people, shocked us.

And all this was completely sincere, and not because it was ordered or forced.

When my mother made pies in our little room, she always put the dough not in a saucepan, but in a bucket.

Do you have to feed everyone?

And our entire generation grew up on these concepts.

- There was only one Olympics in my life, where at the age of 18 I competed as an athlete, and the feeling that the Games are war is still in my memory.

- And there is.

Moreover, this war manifests itself in absolutely everything: in relation to rivals, in refereeing.

Therefore, 50 years ago, and to this day, experienced coaches say: in order to win this war, you need to be head on, two heads stronger, harder and better.

Otherwise, you will be crushed and swept away.

Therefore, at all sports colleges in Soviet times, it was customary to raise the question: how many Olympic medals can a country win in a particular sport?

If it was about the fact that the level of results allows you to fight only for fifth or seventh place, people simply were not sent to the Games.

It was probably quite cruel to the athletes, but those who went to compete won.

And they won a lot.

- Is it right to perceive big sport as a war, and put the principle of "Victory at any cost" at the forefront?

- I do not know.

But I know for sure that it’s wrong to treat sports from the position: it doesn’t matter what place you take, the main thing is to go.

And this is exactly what I see quite often now.

In general, my point of view is this: if you are in a world where the main measure of success is victory, if you give a lot of time to training and you are constantly busy with many top-class specialists from trainers and operators to doctors and massage therapists, then it is completely indecent not to set a goal achieve the absolute best results at the highest level.

That is, at the Olympic Games.

This is a great sport and interesting to the world.

This is what moves him forward.

Therefore, we remember Larisa Latynina, Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, the same Valery Borzov, who went to his sector in Munich and tore apart all the great black sprinters before the eyes of the whole world.

- Are you very depressed by the current suspension of Russian athletes from the opportunity to compete at the international level?

There is nothing good in this, of course.

But I don't see a big tragedy either.

If we have already managed to recover and restore the country from the absolutely horrific consequences of the Great Patriotic War ... I understand that my example and the example of my family are just a particularity, but we really had to rise from complete devastation.

In this regard, the very departure of the USSR national team to the Olympic Games in Melbourne some ten years after the Victory was a colossal achievement.

Everyone was dressed up, sent to the other side of the world, and, as I found out later, they paid in gold to quickly and conveniently deliver our entire team to Australia.

But in terms of numbers, our Olympic delegation was second after the United States at those Games.

And everyone returned home with a grandiose result.

True, they returned for a month, but that's another story.

- In other words, even then the country's leadership understood that sport is the very lever that can greatly influence the revival of the state?

It has always been like this, and not only in our country.

I think that American politicians understood in the same way that it is possible to reach agreements through sport, for the sake of which diplomats have been knocking on closed doors for years to no avail.

Plus, another important point: no matter what the relations between states are, the athlete of your country wins, rises to the podium, plays the anthem in his honor, and everyone stands up as a sign of respect.

Perhaps, again, I argue as a very old person, brought up in other times and on other values, but in this I also see the great meaning of the Olympic Games and the mission of champions.

And I think that sport itself in this sense is a guarantee of a normal relationship with each other and the unification of the whole world.

You can hate your opponent as much as you like at the time of the performance, but you cannot not respect him, knowing at what cost Olympic victories are given.

And be that as it may, the ability to overcome any life hardships also comes through sports.

- According to this logic, Russia should now make efforts to prevent a drop in the level of its athletes?

— Quite right.

It is important not to lose primarily children's sports.

- Did the situation in Ukraine somehow affect your relations with colleagues?

I mean, first of all, Latynina, with whom you have been friends for more than half a century.

- It's not an easy topic.

Larisa was born in Kherson, which now appears in the news reports every day, and I perfectly understand what is going on in a person’s soul, especially in an older person than myself.

Therefore, I try to protect it as much as possible.

Do not ask questions, do not touch on certain topics in conversations.

However, we call up every day.

After all, by and large, all we can do now is to support each other with all our might.