Gymnastics Name Dropping

This is Aimee with Olympic Silver Medalist Mohini Bhardwaj at a recent UCLA gymnastics meet.

Ever since my husband and I were blessed with tickets to the 1984 Olympic gymnastics meet, I've been a gymnastics fan. We were privileged to see both the silver-medal U.S. women's team with the dynamic Mary-Lou Retton and the gold medalist men's team with Peter Vidmar and Bart Connors.

So you have to know it's a thrill to have my seven-year old daughter involved in the sport. And when I say involved, I mean involved. She trains four hours a day, five days a week and loves it. When she has a day off, she'll often be heard to say, "Oh I wish I were at the gym." This is not my dream, it's hers and I'm here to support it. I'm very proud of her, can you tell?

But, I digress, I must get back to my name-dropping.
Ever heard of a Yurechnko Vault? A Yurechenko is "a round-off on to the spring board, back-handspring onto the vault, then blocking off your hands to complete a salto in the air and land." (I just looked that up on google,I knew it was a vault but I didn't know the description. I think there's also a bars move named after her but I didn't find it in my search. Isn't the internet great?)

Well, we saw the person this move is named after, Natalia Yurechenko, now coaching in New Jersey. She was at our gym with her gymnasts for a meet that Aimee's gym sponsored at UCLA. Aimee also competed at the meet. I wouldn't have known who she was except Chuck and I struck up a conversation with one of the girls parents who happened to mention that their head coach was Yurechenko. Then I made sure I was able to get a look at her. (If it weren't for the Soviet boycott in 1984 she might have given Mary-Lou Retton a run for the AA gold, but we'll never know will we?) There's another reason to get a camera phone I guess. You never know when you're going to see an Olympic gymnast.

Please indulge me for one more name, Russian Olympic gold medalist Valeri Liukin, now the head coach of WOGA, in Plano, Texas. WOGA is the gym that produced Olympic gold medalist Carly Patterson and world champion(maybe she got second at world's, I could google again and find out but I have other things pressing right now and I want to get it out there.) and daughter, Nastia Liukin. He was also at the meet sponsored by our gym. Too bad his daughter Nastia didn't make the trip.

Anyway, these are a few of the gymnastics names that I've been hobnobbing around with lately. Of course there's the up and coming level 5 gymnast (my daughter), now being coached by two-time Olympian from Bulgaria Galina Marinova.