Skip to footer

Olympics gymnastics: 5 athletes to watch

Some of the best Olympic drama can be found on the high beams or mats. This is the stage where Kerri Strug and Nadia Comaneci became global stars. Any slight wobble or misstep can undo a performance, making gymnastics competitions far from predictable. Butt here are five gymnasts who should find themselves in the medals hunt in London.

Viktoria Komova, Russia

Matt Dunham/AP
Russia's Viktoria Komova, right, fans her teammate Ksenia Afanasyeva with a towel to keep cool in the hot practice arena as they train ahead of the 2012 Summer Olympics, Tuesday, July 24, in London.

  • By Ross Atkin Staff writer

It’s been 24 years (and five Olympics) since a Russian gymnast last won the women’s all-around competition, but Viktoria Komova, a 5 ft. 1 in., 76-pound dynamo nicknamed “Vika,” might just end the drought. At last year’s world championships in Tokyo, she was edged out for the all-around title by American Jordyn Wieber, whose hair’s-breadth winning margin was disputed by the Russian gymnastics federation. The battle for gold in London may boil down to which of the top contenders – Komova, fellow Russian Aliya Mustafina, Wieber or her teammate, Gabby Douglas – is most consistent and can avoid falling.

Komova is from a gymnastics family.  Both her parents were gymnasts. Her mother, Vera Kolesnikova, won the all-around championship at the 1986 Goodwill Games and is now a gymnastics judge.  Her daughter’s bright prospects for stardom were evident in 2010, when she was the all-around winner at the 2010 Youth Olympic Games and followed that up with her strong showing at the 2011 worlds, where she won the uneven bars event.

1 of 5
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.