Elena Vyacheslavovna Mukhina (Russian: Елена Вячеславовна Мухина; first name sometimes rendered "Yelena", last name sometimes rendered "Muchina"; 1 June 1960 – 22 December 2006) was a Soviet gymnast who won the all-around title at the 1978 World Championships in Strasbourg, France. Her career was on the rise, and she was widely touted as the next great gymnastics star until 1979, when she broke a leg and missed several competitions. The rushed recovery from that injury, combined with pressure to master a dangerous and difficult tumbling move (the Thomas salto) caused her to break her neck two weeks before the opening of the 1980 Summer Olympics, leaving her permanently quadriplegic.
Elena Mukhina was born 1 June 1960, in Moscow. She was raised by her grandmother, Anna Ivanovna after being orphaned at a young age; according to different sources, she was either orphaned at age five, or her mother died when she was three and her father left the family.
Mukhina took an interest in gymnastics and figure skating at an early age. When an athletic scout visited her school, she eagerly volunteered to try out for gymnastics. She later joined the CSKA Moscow sports club and was eventually inducted into the CSKA Hall of Fame.
Through 1975, Mukhina was largely unnoticed as a gymnast. Then, two separate incidents brought her to the forefront for the Soviet team. Firstly was the Romanian domination of the Soviet gymnasts at the 1976 Olympics. For this, the director for Soviet women's gymnastics, Larisa Latynina, was blamed but responded, "it's not my fault that Nadia Comăneci was not born in the Soviet Union.". This increased pressure on Soviet gymnasts to return to winning competitions. Secondly was Mukhina's transition to working with men's coach Mikhail Klimenko.
Klimenko had not worked with girls before, but Mukhina's previous coach, Alexander Eglit, encouraged him to consider her. Klimenko was impressed by her intelligence and coordination and began training her. In a 1978 profile, Mukhina described herself as someone who wanted to perform advanced acrobatics but was scared of them and often cried when Klimenko began teaching her new elements.
She participated in the 1975 Spartakiad and, after a poor landing, suffered a spinal injury that made her unable to turn her head. She was supposed to wear a cervical collar to recover, but Klimenko daily brought her from the hospital to the gym to train without it. Mukhina was reportedly afraid to disclose injuries to her coach and would hide them from him. She once dislocated her thumb and continued training through intense pain after repositioning it herself, and on another occasion, she won a competition after having received a concussion, stimulating herself with smelling salts.
Mukhina won the 1976 Soviet junior championships, though she did not qualify as a member of the Olympic team.
Throughout her early career, Mukhina was given multiple different birth years. She was described as being 15 in an October 1974 article in Krasnaya Zvezda, the official newspaper of the Soviet military, implying she was born in 1959. However, in March 1976, Sovetsky Sport, the official Soviet sports newspaper, published the national gymnastics teams and gave her a birth year of 1961, as did both domestic and foreign articles describing her appearances in gymnastics meets over the next few months. Late in 1976, Soviet sources began to give her birth year as 1960, the year that is engraved on her headstone.
In 1977, at the 1977 European Championships, she won silver and the all-around and three event titles in the balance beam, uneven bars, and floor exercise finals, along with a bronze medal on vault. She also placed second at the Soviet championships. Later in the year, she competed at the USSR Cup. There she ruptured her Achilles tendon and continued competing against medical advice, and she won the all-around silver medal.
The next year, she won the all-around at the Soviet championships despite pain in her foot.
Mukhina drew notice at the 1978 World Championships in Strasbourg, France, when she won the all-around ahead of Olympic champions Nadia Comăneci and Nellie Kim. She also tied for gold in the floor exercise event final and won two silver medals on balance beam and uneven bars. At the event, she debuted three new elements: a full-twisting layout Korbut flip on the uneven bars, a tucked double back salto dismount on balance beam, and a full-twisting double back salto on floor. Mukhina was praised for combining difficult routines with a graceful and individual style. She was predicted to be a possible contender at the upcoming 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow.
In 1979, Mukhina placed fourth in the all-around at the 1979 European Championships, where she also won gold on the uneven bars and silver on the floor. This was her last major competition.
A 1978 documentary film of the Soviet national team, You are in Gymnastics (Russian: Ты в гимнастике) features Mukhina talking with her coach, Mikhail Klimenko, and footage of her rigorous training regimen. The film presented her as an example of a gymnast who used willpower to overcome pain.
Mukhina's floor exercise tumbling passes were considered revolutionary at the time because they included a never-before seen combination salto (the "Mukhina"). In 1979, her coach wanted her to take it a step further and become one of the few female gymnasts to do an element taken from men's gymnastics, the Thomas salto (a 1½ backflip with 1½ twists ending in a forward roll, perfected by American gymnast Kurt Thomas).
Mukhina soon realized the Thomas salto was extremely dangerous, because it depended on being able to get enough height and speed to make all the flips and mid-air twists and still land in-bounds with enough room to do the forward roll, and it took perfect timing to avoid either under-rotation (and landing on the chin) or over-rotation (and landing on the back of the head). In the 1991 documentary More than a Game, Mukhina spoke of trying to convince her coach that the Thomas salto was a dangerous element:
... my injury could have been expected. It was an accident that could have been anticipated. It was inevitable. I had said more than once that I would break my neck doing that element. I had hurt myself badly several times but he [coach Mikhail Klimenko] just replied people like me don't break their necks.
In 1979, while training for the 1979 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships, Mukhina, already suffering from fatigue from her workouts to the point where she struggled to cross the street in front of her gym before the pedestrian light changed, broke her leg. Due to her injury, she did not compete at the World Championships, where the Soviet women's team lost to the Romanian team, and only Nellie Kim and Stella Zakharova were able to medal. She did not want to keep competing, but Klimenko persuaded her to continue training.
With less than a year until the 1980 Summer Olympics would be held in Moscow, the pressure was on the Soviet team coaches and doctors to get the previous all-around champion Mukhina back on her feet and ready for the games. In an interview with Ogonyok magazine, Mukhina blamed the doctors at TsITO (Central Institute of Traumatology and Orthopedics), who were serving the National Team, for attempting to rush her back into training too soon, saying she begged them not to remove her cast and discharge her because "they're dragging me from home to workouts", and she knew she was not yet healed. When doctors removed her cast against her wishes and had her try walking on the leg, she said that she knew she was walking "crookedly", and that something was not right. The TsITO doctors x-rayed the leg, and discovered that the fracture had not healed properly. Mukhina was rushed into surgery that afternoon, but the damage had already been done to her reputation; one of the National Team coaches, she said in the Ogonyok interview, showed up at her bed the day after surgery, and outright stated that she "wasn't conscientious", and that she could still "train in a cast".