The old story of Legendary Elena Mukhina Thomas Salto Video Goes Viral on social media twitter, reddit and youtube after she was forced to come back from a broken leg at the 1980 olympics and she broke her neck and became permanently paralyzed.
What is Thomas Salto element in Gymnastic?
The Thomas Salto move is going backwards, doing one-and-a-half somersaults with one and a half twists and end it with a head forward roll.
Who is Elena Mukhina?
Elena was a Soviet gymnast who won the all around tittle & the FX at the 1978 World Championship. She made history in this competition by unveiling her signature moves. Among which are the doubleback beam dismount and full twisting double back on floor.
At age of 5, she lost her mother and she has nobody beside her only grandmother as a family to protect her.
In 1979, while training for the 1979 worlds competition, Mukhina suffered a broken leg which kept her from competing. It was a competition in which the Soviet gymnast team suffered it’s first defeat at the hands of their archrivals from Romania.
Mukhina flip / Loop
One of the Mukhina famous signature moves is called “Mukhina flip” or “Mukhina loop”. A variation of Korbut flip which includes a full twist in the air.
This move has since been banned in the gymnastics Code of Points. In the late 80s, the code changed so that gymnasts were no longer allowed to stand on the highest bar where they could only do flips off the low bar.
What happened to Soviet gymnast team in 1980?
The pressure wa on the Soviet team coaches and doctors to get the previous all around champion Mukhina back on her feet and ready for the 1980 games.
Mukhina begged to the coaches and doctors not to remove her cast and discharge her because “they’re dragging me from home to workouts” and she knew she was not yet healed.
When doctors removed her cast against her wishes and had her try walking on the leg, she said that she knew she was walking ‘crookedly’ and that something was not right.
From her x-ray showed that the fracture didn’t heal properly and would not be able to sustain the pounding of gymnastic in its present condition. Mukhina was rushed into surgery that afternoon but the damage had already been done to her reputation.
One of the national team coaches showed up at her bed day after surgery and outright stated that she “wasnt conscientious” and that she could still “train in a cast”.
Golden Jade Carey Floor Routine Video During Training and Olympics
Elena Mukhina returned to training for the Olympics
Once more against her wishes, the doctors removed her cast prematurely, and Mukhina returned to training for the Olympics.
With lingering weakness in her leg and mounting exhaustion from the grueling weight loss workouts she had to do to lose the surgery weight, Mukhina had great difficulty coming back up to speed on performing The Thomas Salto move.
Keep doing dangerous routine
Despite Mukhina’s warnings that the Thomas Salto move was constantly causing minor injuries and was dangerous enough to potentially cause major injuries, she was pushed to keep the element in her floor routine training and competition.
Elena had alerted the coaches more than once that she would break her neck because of the dangerous element in Thomas Salto element. Despite her worry because she had hurt herself several times, her coaches just replied that elite gymnast like her just don’t break their necks easily.
Before the Moscow 1980 Summer Olympics
Two weeks before the historical Olympics, Mukhina was practicing the element containing Thomas Salto move when she under-rotated the salto and crash-landed on her chin, snapping her spine on July 3, 1980.
She then was instantly rendered a quadriplegic – The injury occurs when the neck area of the spinal cord is injured and she could not move her body from her neck down.
Elena Mukhina Thomas Salto Video
