Victor Tchoukarine

Gymnastics Director

• Born: November 9, 1921
• Birthplace: Krasnoarmeyskoye, Soviet Union (now in Ukraine)
• Died: August 1, 1984
• Place of death: Moscow, Soviet Union (now in Russia)

Sport: Gymnastics

Early Life

Victor Ivanovich Tchoukarine was born on November 9, 1921, in the village of Krasnoarmeyskoye, near the Dnieper River in what is now the Ukraine. He began his involvement in gymnastics as a child and made his competitive debut in 1938. However, World War II interrupted Victor’s early career. He fought on the front in the Soviet army, was injured and captured, and spent four years as a prisoner of war in Germany. Upon his return home after the war, he was so weak and physically deteriorated that his mother could not positively recognize him except by a childhood scar. Doctors told Victor that he would never do gymnastics again. However, enduring injuries and captivity during the war had strengthened him, and he had developed the characteristics of will and perseverance that later helped him as an international gymnastics competitor.

The Road to Excellence

Unlike most male gymnasts in later decades who begin training and competing internationally in their late teens, Victor began his career in his late twenties. He studied and trained at the Lvov Institute of Physical Culture, graduating in 1950, earning the title of Honored Master of the Sport in 1951, and competing as a member of the Burevestnik Sports Society. In that same year, he won his third successive title as Soviet Gymnastics Champion and became a member of the Soviet Communist Party.

At the time of Victor’s emergence, the world of international gymnastics was undergoing immense change. Prior to the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, Finland, Soviet athletes did not participate, and international men’s gymnastics competition had been dominated by Finnish, Swiss, and German competitors. In 1952, the modern age of gymnastics began with the emergence of strong Soviet and Japanese teams, who immediately attained long-lasting domination over the sport.

Victor was a classically trained gymnast whose style was marked by restraint, precision, and strength. Rather than incorporating dramatic moves or clever tricks into his routines, he utilized a static technique, especially on the rings, where his upper-body strength allowed him to move slowly and surely into traditional positions. His strength also helped him on the parallel bars and the pommel horse, two of his stronger events. He was a focused performer, calm and shy in public, who did exercises to train his mind as well as his body.

The Emerging Champion

The 1952 Olympics were Victor’s first taste of international competition. Already established over teammates Grant Chaguinyan and Valentin Mouratov as the Soviet champion, Victor made an authoritative display in Helsinki, taking gold medals in the all-around, pommel horse, and vault competitions and a silver medal in the rings and parallel bars. In addition, the Soviets took the team title with an impressive margin over the Swiss.

With the explosion of the Soviets onto the international scene, the gymnastics world came alive. After the Helsinki Olympics, Victor faced a great deal of competition from both his own team and others, an array of gymnasts prepared to challenge the world superiority he established in Helsinki.

On the national level, he repeated his Soviet championships in 1953 and 1955. In 1955, he wrote Put’k vershinam (the road to the peaks), a book based on his experiences and views, which gained him further fame among the Soviet peoples.

Internationally, Victor tied with teammate Mouratov for the all-around title at the 1954 World Gymnastics Championships in Rome, Italy, leading a Soviet sweep of the first five places. Victor also took a gold medal in the parallel bars and placed among the top four competitors in every event but the horizontal bar, consistently his weakest.

At the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, Australia, Victor faced new challenges, including Yuri Titov and Boris Shakhlin on his own team and a vastly improved Japanese squad led by Takashi Ono and Masao Takemoto. During a warm-up, Victor injured his thumb, but rather than dropping out of particular events or withdrawing from the Games completely, he proceeded according to plan with his rehearsed routines. Not only did he make it through the competition, but he walked away with three gold medals, including his second successive Olympic gold medal as all-around champion. In the face of adversity, Victor’s supremacy was confirmed.

Continuing the Story

Victor retired from competition after the 1956 Olympics, still a champion at the age of thirty-five, but he continued his work in gymnastics as a trainer and coach. For his accomplishments in international contests, he was honored by the Soviet government with the Order of Lenin.

In 1961, Victor became coach of the gymnastics team of the Armenian Republic. Two years later he became an assistant professor at his alma mater, the Lvov Institute of Physical Culture, and in 1971, he was appointed the institute’s head gymnastics instructor. The following year he was given the title of Honored Coach of the Ukrainian Republic. Victor Tchoukarine died of stomach cancer in Moscow, in the summer of 1984, at the age of sixty-two.

Summary

At a time when men’s gymnastics was coming of age and entering a new era in its competitive energy, technical demands, and audience appeal, Victor Tchoukarine led the Soviet team to lasting domination and set the standard against which his eventual successors—Boris Shakhlin, Yukio Endo, Nikolai Andrianov—were measured.

Bibliography

Brokhin, Yuri. The Big Red Machine: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Olympic Champions. Translated by Glenn Garelik. New York: Random House, 1978.

Greenberg, Stan. Whitaker’s Olympic Almanack: An Encyclopaedia of the Olympic Games. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000.

Wallechinsky, David, and Jaime Loucky. The Complete Book of the Olympics: 2008 Edition. London: Aurum Press, 2008.