Work Text:
Here is what she knows: she will never fall out of love with gymnastics.
Here is how the story begins:
There is a girl who is born in 1975 in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. Seven years later, she starts gymnastics classes, and six years after that, she wins the junior national all-around title and gains national attention.
Three years later, she wins the vault silver and floor exercise title in her debut world championship and gets the full-twisting double layout named after her.
This would be a fairly normal trajectory for a gymnast, if you ignore the historical context. In the same year that Oksana Chusovitina debuts at worlds, the Soviet Union falls apart, and the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic becomes Uzbekistan.
The year after her country falls apart, she heads to the Olympics as part of the Unified Team, wins a team gold medal while finishing seventh in the floor final, and heads back to Uzbekistan with her coach.
At this point, the following question may be asked: how does one go from competing for the greatest program in the world to one nowhere near the same caliber?
There is an adjustment period. She is faced with unsafe equipment and a dearth of teammates, but she perseveres, and goes on to win the bronze medal on vault just a year after moving to Tashkent.
This kicks off a thirteen-year-old whirlwind of a career for her home nation, where she goes to three Olympics, wins three world vault medals, and gets three skills named after her on vault and bars.
In the midst of the gymnastics, she goes to college and gets married and has a child and goes back to competing after giving birth.
Her life has deviated significantly from the normal trajectory of gymnasts' lives, but she doesn’t care.
Then her son gets diagnosed with cancer and she receives a help-offer from Germany. In exchange for joining the German national team and moving to Cologne, her son’s chemotherapy will be funded.
She accepts the offer, and begins to compete for a third country.
In her first year of membership on the German National Team, she wins a world vault bronze medal in the first world championships held under the new judging system. In her second year of membership, she wins a world vault silver medal, and helps her adopted country qualify a team to the Olympics.
And in her third year of membership, sixteen years after her Olympic debut, Oksana Chusovitina wins her first individual Olympic medal.
She briefly retires after the next world championships. But the call of her sport is too strong, so she comes back a year later, wins another world vault medal, and makes it to her sixth Olympics.
At this point, she has become a legend, and retirement would be both inevitable and shocking. So she moves back to Uzbekistan, competes again for her homeland, has her former teammate coach her, and begins to train the hardest vault ever performed by a female gymnast.
Twenty-five years after her debut at the world championships, Oksana Chusovitina becomes both the only gymnast to ever compete in seven consecutive Olympics and the oldest ever gymnastics competitor.
Twenty-four years after her Olympic debut, she makes her third consecutive vault final, finishes in seventh place after erring on her Produnova, and decides to keep going.
There is still so much she has yet to do, and she loves the sport too much to let it go.