At 33, and a mother, she wins silver in *gymnastics*, and her story runs deeper still...

[acroyear]

2008 Beijing Summer Olympics | Oksana Chusovitina, Interview Questions | NBC Olympics. A fascinating interview with the 33 year old Women's vault silver medalist, a former Soviet now competing for Germany (and she explains why...).

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[cozit.livejournal.com]

The first day of the trials for women's gymnastics, NBC ran a story on her when she was up for one of the events. She's one of the few other than US, China, and a couple of the Russians and Romanians who were shown that night. Shows her son playing at the gym, too (IIRC just playing, not tumbling, but I could be wrong).

The girl and I were talking about how nice the Chinese and American teams were being to each other... and I mentioned that it *used* to be that you'd *never* see one team talking to another at the Olympics, but at this one compliments and support were offered to other teams a number of times.

One of the neatest things about her (and her son's) story is just how much others in the gymnastics world have supported them. And how much she and others have kept in touch with each other through the years (it's interesting that they mention "Nastia's gym" donating money, neglecting to mention in that comment that her father apparently gave them a fairly large amount of money to help out, fairly quickly... showing that the connections are still there and strong so many years after they worked together). Sometimes the world growing smaller is a good thing indeed.