The Edge of Every Day

by Marin Sardy

  It helped, too, that Svetlana was a master of the perfectly straight line—an element fundamental to the sport, informing nearly every move in every event. Given this and her long limbs, it was almost inevitable that she became known as the Belarusian Swan.

  But that was too easy. As if in reply to ballet-inspired comparisons, Svetlana performed for years to floor music that was rock ’n’ roll or world beat, not classical. And she sometimes betrayed a lack of self-awareness that revealed just how instinctual her grace really was. Her short brown ponytail, clipped and sprayed into submission behind a roll of curled bangs, or escaping in wispy rebellion in spite of her efforts, seemed almost comically artless as a frame for those exotic eyes. More than that, though, she appeared not to know that her dance steps, although beautifully presented, came off as kooky and a little bizarre. She might walk with exaggerated flat-footedness, roll her shoulders, sway a hip—once, she even threw in a couple of froggy jumps with her feet flexed and knees splayed. Every routine contained at least one undulation (perhaps calculated to show off the preternatural flexibility of her spine), often imbued with thick hints of defiant eroticism. There was something baffling in the content of her gestures, and I think now that this is where I discerned the disjointedness of her personality, which I suspect is what gave rise to her artistry, and why she could not even see it.

  As a teenager watching her on television, when I was a gymnast too, and only two years her junior, I grew to revere her beyond all the more obvious foci of my adoration—that is to say, the Americans. The appeal of Mary Lou Retton and her ilk, like Phoebe Mills and Kim Zmeskal, hinged on their winning. The thing about Svetlana was that she was memorable whether she won or not. And she often didn’t. There were years when she struggled, seemed too old or too defeated by bigger demons to bend gravity to her will. Over time she became like a signal coming through the noise.

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  Adolescence is the age of perfection in only a few realms, and gymnastics is one of them. I was twelve when I became a gymnast—a late start in that sport and the thing that, despite the talent I exhibited, effectively blocked me from ever becoming more than a varsity staple. I progressed from rolls to round-offs and flips and twists, landed spots on competitive club teams, and helped my high school win second in state. But I wouldn’t go on to compete in college gymnastics. I didn’t think I was good enough, and I probably wasn’t. Yet what success I had was enough, because I wasn’t really in it to win. I was in it for something much more necessary.

  As spectators of sports, we project ourselves into our champions in acts of self-invention. We observe the best closely, and our favorites are often the ones in whom we find echoes of ourselves. When we see our champions win, we tell ourselves this means we can win too, despite our flaws, our failings, our inadequacies. Gymnastics was a world of absolute order and I wanted to believe I could fit into that order. But I never quite did. In Svetlana I saw a girl who aligned with my idea of what I wanted to be—pretty, serene, perfect—and simultaneously upended it. The essential mystery of her, that self-contradictory presentation, was rare in gymnastics, a sport that attracts more conventional personalities. Through Svetlana I sensed that there were others, other gymnasts, who felt chaos thrashing just beyond the edges of their tidy routines. Who even sometimes let it in.

  I know now that Svetlana’s own gymnastics story began at the age of six, when her parents first enrolled her in a class. A few years later she left her hometown of Minsk to live at a Soviet training center near Moscow, far from her family. By the time the renowned Soviet coach Lyubov Miromanova was preparing the fifteen-year-old for her first Olympics, Svetlana had lived with her for nearly half her life, subsumed into Miromanova’s family as one of their own. By all accounts, Miromanova was a “surrogate mother” and “like a second mother” to the young gymnast. She led Svetlana to her first great victories—two gold medals at the ’88 Games. Then, three days after returning home, Miromanova was found dangling from her apartment balcony. She had apparently hanged herself.

  If any explanation for the suicide was uncovered, it never reached the American media. The cause remained a mystery to most, possibly even to Svetlana, who rarely spoke about it publicly. The following year, however, at the ’89 World Championships, her floor routine reached its peak choreographic originality. Her dance moves included pausing dramatically for a beat or two to bang the air with her fists, as well as shaking her hands as if flicking water off them. At one point she even played an exaggerated air guitar—a move that is now legendary in gymnastics circles. An announcer noted that some judges objected that the routine was “too avant-garde.” Another described her performance as “abstract and even disarming,” musing aloud that it “seemed to reflect her inner turmoil” over Miromanova’s death. I can’t help but wonder what it must have taken for her to wear such confusion and pain on her body in world competition. But then, that might have been what made it possible for her to compete at all.

  In interviews, Svetlana seemed a model Soviet, unfailingly team-minded and self-deprecating. But this was to some degree a fiction she wasn’t always able to maintain. She was ferociously competitive and, by her own later admission, not above intimidating or bullying other gymnasts. I suspect, too, that loss and grief brought out the worst in her. In 1991 she made headlines for “snubbing” American gymnast Kim Zmeskal after losing to her at that year’s World Championships, claiming that Zmeskal had failed to shake her hand the night before. The longtime coach of the American team, Bela Karolyi, was incensed and later recalled having found Svetlana “arrogant and nasty.” But a year later, when a journalist asked about the incident as the 1992 Olympics approached, Svetlana seemed shaken by the memory and furtively wiped away a tear.

  My losses, too, had made me eccentric—socially clumsy and prone to random, intense obsessions. I buried myself beneath a facade of conformity, and I suppose I paid for that. In high school, mental blocks rolled in. On balance beam, attempting the back tuck dismount, I froze. And froze, and froze. The move was easy for me in a physical sense. But with that hard wooden beam behind me, I never got past some wall of fear. Only in my imagination could I follow Svetlana’s lead.

  By the time Svetlana reached Barcelona, nineteen years old and leading the amalgam of former Soviets known as the Unified Team, announcers were describing her as a sort of team mother. I was by then one of the oldest gymnasts on my team, adored by the little girls and adoring them in return. When I practiced my jazzy floor routine, they would line up at the edge of the mat and dance my Charleston steps along with me. But I was also envious of how much better than me they already were, or clearly would become. During the preliminary rounds of the Barcelona competition, I was riveted by a shot of Svetlana comforting the tiny, fifteen-year-old Tatiana Gutsu—a star already and a superior gymnast in many ways—on the sidelines after a shocking fall from the balance beam. The horrified Gutsu, who completed moves so difficult that even today the skill level of her routines is rarely matched, was crying unabashedly. Svetlana wrapped her slender arms around the Ukrainian girl’s neck and pulled her close. Her face, visible to the camera over the top of Gutsu’s head, wore a look of stoically sympathetic calm. Yes, her eyes seemed to say, I know.

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  —

  The best gymnasts walk a line between drama and control, the winners typically resolving the conflict through sheer physical power. Svetlana had this option only in her first few years in world competition. A gymnast’s peak age is around fifteen, which Svetlana reached in 1988—the year of her first Olympics. By the early nineties, she was beginning to slip from her power-matches-prettiness niche, and few believed she could continue to hold her ground as a champion. The difficulty of her routines wasn’t keeping up with the runaway progress of the sport. Even as she improved, the standards of the sport were rising much faster. Yet somehow, as this happened, she was becoming more compelling to w
atch.

  Poring over videos of Svetlana’s floor routines across three Olympics, from 1988 to 1996, I realize no one would guess that so many years lay between them. Her body remained the same elongated Y—shoulders twice as wide as her hips, her waist narrow and limber, all muscle and bone. Nearly her entire career as a global contender occurred while she was supposed to be on the decline. Her weaknesses, however, did begin to show. In the ’92 European Championships, with her second Olympics on the horizon, she fell during the floor exercise on her final tumbling pass, a tucked double back. It was the most difficult floor routine of her career, but at the end she didn’t get quite enough height. She landed short and lurched forward onto her knees, into an automatic half-point deduction. Many doubted that she could keep up with her teammates at the coming Olympics. She would have to rely on her dramatic lines to compensate for what were now, relatively speaking, unspectacular skills. Maybe the surprise was that the lines became the spectacle.

  Following the progress of those Olympics on subscription Triplecast at a teammate’s house, I passed a weekend anticipating Svetlana’s routines with almost embarrassed intensity. As she stood ready to begin her floor exercise for the team final, it felt right that her uniform was black and white, its colors split diagonally across the front in a pattern suggesting lightning, or feathers. She sat down into an opening pose in which her back arched so that she was perched on the top of her head with her arms raised straight up—quintessentially dramatic and strange. Spanish guitar began to play. Then everything broke open. It was in the steps, the turns, that spine. It was in the way she could lace her movements with an edge so sharp that she seemed less like an athlete than an electrical storm. When she nailed her tucked double back, you felt it in your sternum. With that routine she led the Unified Team to victory.

  But although Svetlana took home a team gold, she didn’t medal in any of the individual event competitions or in the ultimate prize of the individual all-around. No one was surprised that after those Games, verging on twenty years old, she retired. Most gymnasts have one Olympics in them, maybe two. She moved to the United States and joined the professional exhibition circuit, touring as a performance gymnast, working the crowds at the gymnastics equivalent of the Ice Capades. I hated to watch her in those expos. To my eye, they parodied precisely what they were meant to valorize. She strutted onto the floor in a leather motorcycle jacket and a black baseball cap, as if to recall Marlon Brando in The Wild One, and all of it felt silly and reductive on a woman whose rebel music had been much more than a pop-cultural meme. She seemed not to see her own authenticity, not to grasp the scope of her reach.

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  —

  Three years later I was in college, smoking weed and studying biology and listening to a lot of grunge. Having at last escaped the orbit of my mother’s illness, I moved on to jogging and yoga and rarely talked about gymnastics anymore. The nearest I drew to that previous life happened only occasionally, late at night while walking home drunk from friends’ parties, when just for kicks I would run suddenly to throw a tumbling pass on a nearby lawn. My friends, protective, tried to hold me back. There was no need. Those handsprings were embedded so deep in my cells that drunkenness couldn’t touch them.

  It wasn’t until the Summer Games drew near again that I learned Svetlana was back. She had been training with the American team under Karolyi’s tutelage and sprung back into world competition in 1995, competing for Belarus. After a tepid start, she did so well at the 1996 European Championships that she took home a silver all-around medal, qualifying her to compete in one last Olympics. She was twenty-three.

  To return to that level of competition in that sport, at that age, after that long. It was the kind of amazing that maybe only a fellow gymnast could grasp—someone who had grown up as a gymnast and then already grown old as a gymnast. It was the kind of amazing that made your eyes flood. Svetlana would be one of the only female gymnasts ever to compete in three Olympics. In that land of perpetual girlhood, I had watched her leave girlhood behind. So I watched her again, out of love and loyalty and also, maybe, to learn something about womanhood now that our girlhood was gone.

  In 1996, with the Unified Team disbanded, Svetlana seemed an avatar of a bygone era. One announcer said there had been talk that she couldn’t have earned a spot on the Unified Team if such a powerful aggregate still existed. By then, younger gymnasts were flaunting skills that required physical strength of a kind that women’s gymnastics had never seen before. Svetlana’s later contemporaries, like Kerri Strug, blew judges away (and unnerved the sport’s fairly conservative fan base) with the muscular builds that made possible their huge tumbling passes. Svetlana never put on that kind of muscle, and what’s more, her prime time for skill acquisition was far behind her. She was already an adult. Making a quantum leap forward with the sport was simply not possible.

  So she faced off against gymnasts who were nearly a decade younger than her, whom she towered above and, tipping the scales at about a hundred and ten, outweighed by some thirty pounds. The minuscule Dominique Moceanu, America’s fourteen-year-old, four-foot-five-inch wunderkind, looked like a small child beside her. The benefits of smallness were clearer than ever, especially on beam, where Moceanu stuck a sequence of one back-handspring followed by three laid-out backflips. Such a string of tumbling moves would be impossible for a taller gymnast to fit within the length of the beam. As it was, Svetlana nearly tipped off the end whenever she performed her usual sequence, which was identical to Moceanu’s, minus one layout.

  The effortlessness of her early tumbling was gone by then. Her skills were exceptional, but they often suggested how hard she was working. She responded by relying heavily on her twists and choosing choreography that highlighted both her originality and her maturity. The result was that, maybe more than ever, her perfection looked better than anyone else’s perfection. She opened her floor exercise routine with the same full-in-back-out that she had performed in 1988 and closed with a two-and-a-half-twisting layout leading directly into a (perfect) punch front. Positioned confidently and moving smoothly, she made it look almost as if it were happening in slow motion. Up there in the air, as if at rest.

  It was in her lines, those unbelievable joints, her timing. On bars the lines seemed to take over, with her individual skills almost reduced to links between moments of poetic pause. In moves that other gymnasts tended to pike, she almost suggested an arch. Watching the clip from the all-around competition, I get chills. In her giant swings, circling the high bar with her body fully extended, her shoulders roll back so far that the hinge at each joint disappears. And when, in a handstand at the top of the high bar, she spins around in a 360-degree pirouette (two in one routine), she is nearly airborne. Her double-layout dismount is like two breaths of wind.

  The crowds were more in love than ever. People were calling her the Goddess of Gymnastics—a play on the Russian root of her last name, boginya, meaning “goddess.” That week Svetlana got at least one standing ovation, and at times you could hear her name being chanted in the stands. But she won no medals. She lacked the necessary difficulty and made too many mistakes. In the compulsories, she had a short landing on floor and a disastrous miss on bars. Her highest final ranking by far, for vault, was fifth place.

  Examining a clip of Moceanu competing on bars against her, I can see that Svetlana really had no chance. Gymnastics had already outrun her. Even now, Moceanu’s speed astounds me. Her power is undeniable, with the difficulty to match. To Svetlana’s double-layout dismount she has added a full twist. But I wince: She pikes the landing. In terms of score, this cost maybe a tenth of a point. Aesthetically it costs much more. It’s not ugly, just un-beautiful. And her handstands are so rushed, her giant swings so flatly forgettable. There are none of those snaps, those artful pauses, none of Svetlana’s breaths of air. Nothing to hold time still, to let us linger with her for another moment before we fall forward i
nto the future.

  Conversations with Family

  All statements are responses made during interviews with my father, sisters, maternal aunts and uncles, and maternal grandmother.

  I could feel that I was losing her to something. I don’t know how early on—I don’t have enough memories of her prior to changing.

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  —

  I wanted somebody to go and check on her. I would talk to Julie, and Kit, and say, “What do you think this is? She’s not talking like a normal person.”

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  —

  It just left me baffled. You know, I’ve never heard anyone describe a delusion at such length. And there was a certain logic and coherence to it. And I honestly didn’t know what to do. This was all beyond me.

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  There was no doubt when she had really gotten herself to believing things that just weren’t true. Including questioning whether I was who I said I was. And whether I was trying to hurt her children. And Ann and I would talk about it and I’d say, “God, can you imagine how frightening that is?” And there’s no doubt in my mind that she did believe it. I mean she just flat-ass believed it.

  * * *

  —

  Did I say to myself, Oh, she’s becoming schizophrenic? No. I didn’t have a thought of anything like that. I just thought, This is irrational, doesn’t make any sense, and we’re not going there. I didn’t know what it was.