Shushunova leads team to triumph

Press, 23 September 1988, Page 22

Shushunova leads team to triumph

NZPA-Reuter Seoul Yelena Shushunova, the merest hint of imbalance away from perfection, led the Soviet Union to a double triumph in the Olympic team gymnastics yesterday. Shushunova scored perfect marks on three of the four apparatus to steal first place in the individual standings from Romania’s Daniela Silivas in the women’s event. Despite the loss of Olga Strazheva during the optional exercises, carried off on a stretcher after falling from the beam, the Russians racked up 395.475 points for the gold. Romania took the silver with 394.125 points, and East Germany — also

minus one team member — held off the United States to win the bronze with 390.875. The Soviet squad claimed the men’s team gold on Tuesday. The United States would have won the bronze had it not had half a point deducted from its score. The penalty was imposed after the compulsories when a reserve exceeded the time limit for helping her team-mates prepare for the asymmetric bars. Shushunova and Silivas traded maximum scores of 10 in the first two rounds, the 19-year-old Soviet star being judged perfect on the horse vault and asymmetric bars and Silivas on the bars and the

beam. It was the beam, the Soviet team’s third discipline, that provided a stutter in their steamroller march towards victory and revenge over the Romanians, who beat them at last year’s world championships. The beam, just 10 centimetres wide, requires the poise, balance and nerve of a ballerina dancing on a high wire. Its potential for danger was demonstrated when Strazheva lost her footing on a back flip and crashed to the ground. She was helped off the podium in agony and later carried away on a stretcher with an ice pack pressed to her left knee. Shushunova went

through her beam routine showing her usual icy nerve immediately after the incident. But she needed a slight adjustment to regain her balance after one landing and she earned 9.95 points instead of another 10. With only five of the six team members’ scores counting on each apparatus, the Soviet Union could afford to lose Strazheva — as long as no-one made mistakes on the final exercise, the floor. They didn’t. Shushunova rounded off the superb team performance by winning her third 10, rubbing it in further by being the only Soviet gymnast to perform her

floor routine to traditional Russian music. She headed the individual standings with 79.975 points, followed by Silivas on 79.575 and Soviet Svetlana Boginskaya with 79.400. Bulgaria came fifth in the team event and China sixth.