MSNBC –
Aug 24 2007
Gymnast spurned by the Soviets welcomes chance to coach an American
champion
By EDDIE PELLS
Associated Press Sports
Updated: 4:08 p.m. ET Aug 23, 2007
The family sat in the airport, minutes away from its long-awaited
exodus out of a country that never felt like home.
But first, one more insult – this one in the form of a decision no
kid should have to make.
There were two boxes, one filled with the mother’s most expensive
jewelry and keepsakes, the other with the medals the daughter had won
during her successful but unappreciated gymnastics career in the
Soviet Union.
"Pick one,” the guard in the security line told Armine Barutyan and
her family.
It was the final slap in the face this young lady would endure before
she moved to the United States and became one of this country’s most
successful gymnastics coaches.
"Some of the things they did to me, I’ll just never understand,”
said Barutyan, now coaching American Ivana Hong and trying to take
her on the Olympic road she was never allowed to travel.
If life had been fair, Barutyan’s name might be as familiar today as
that of Russian superstar Svetlana Khorkina, or maybe even Nadia
Comaneci. She was that good. But things don’t always work out as they
should.
Part of that was because her heyday came in the mid-1980s – as in,
the 1984 Olympics, when the Soviets boycotted the Los Angeles Games,
a political payback for the U.S. boycott of the Moscow Games four
years earlier.
The other part also had to do with politics, but of a much more
sinister type.
Barutyan’s father grew up in Syria, her mother in Jerusalem. They
moved to Armenia after World War II to find a better life and get
closer to the family’s roots. But there, even decades later, the
Barutyans were always viewed as newcomers, outsiders.
And no matter how long you’d lived there, being Armenian in the
postwar Soviet Union was a disadvantage for anyone looking to get
ahead, especially in a promising sports career, the likes of which
Barutyan was embarking upon when she was young.
The USSR was a huge country, spanning 11 time zones and at least 15
nationalities. But diversity was not part of the message in the
Soviet Union of the Cold War era. Rather, the message was one of
unity and power. Part of the superpower’s strategy to present that
kind of front was to have Russian athletes with Russian names leading
the way in the biggest sports.
The Soviets wanted Barutyan to leave home and come closer to Moscow –
not that unusual, even now, in Eastern European countries where
centralized gymnastics training is common. More significantly, they
wanted her to change her name – trading the ‘yan’ ending common to
those of Armenian decent for a more Russian-sounding surname, like
one that ended with "iva” or "ina.”
"I didn’t want to do that,” she said. "That was my family. I didn’t
understand why they would want me to be someone else.”
She paid a steep price for her recalcitrance.
They took away her uniforms, her spot on the national team, even
dropped her in the standings at some meets for no reason – all to
send a message, and fully knowing it hurt the team every bit as much
as the teenager.
In the 1980s, Barutyan was performing tricks none of the other women
were even thinking about then, and that not many do even today.
Her dismount off the uneven bars included three back flips. Off the
balance beam, she did a double layout – two flips with her legs
straight.
The politically correct way to explain away the Soviet Union’s
shunning of her was to say that her moves were so advanced, so
unheard-of, that judges didn’t know how to react to the tricks and,
thus, never gave her the scores she deserved.
It’s not the story Barutyan tells.
Instead, she recalls times before international trips when officials
would tell her they had heard she had relatives in France. Wouldn’t
she like to move there and be with them? Leave her parents and her
home and never come back?
"I had no idea what to say to that. I had no idea what they were
talking about,” she said. "I was a teenager.”
There were times when, despite her top performances, she was left off
the national team for the biggest trips. Other times, she was taken
on those trips, but wished she hadn’t been.
Once, after the team returned from a big, international meet at which
Barutyan had finished second, the women had an audience in front of
an important Soviet government official.
"Who finished first?” the official asked.
"Svetlana Boginskaya,” the coach of the gymnastics program
responded, speaking of the great Russian gymnast, one of Barutyan’s
contemporaries, who went on to win four medals at the 1988 Olympics.
"And who finished second?” the official said.
"Not one of us,” the coach responded.
"I was Armenian,” said Barutyan, who was left off that Seoul Olympic
team despite being one of the USSR’s best. "Things like that happen
and it hurts. They make you feel like nothing.”
More than 20 years later, the memories from those insults still
sting. Barutyan talks about it much more calmly than her husband, Al
Fong, who met the star gymnast shortly after she moved to the United
States.
Barutyan had walked into a Los Angeles gym owned by a friend of
Fong’s. The friend was a pack rat and a gymnastics nut. He recognized
Barutyan immediately, and took her to his office to show her
magazines with her pictures and videotapes of her performances.
She had no idea any of that stuff existed. The Soviets didn’t want
her knowing that anybody else thought she was worthy of worldwide
media coverage.
"He called me and said, ‘You know who just walked in here?”’ Fong
said. "He said I had to hire her.”
Fong did more than that. He married her, too.
Over the last eight years, Fong and Barutyan have established one of
the best elite training centers in the country, Great American
Gymnastics Express outside of Kansas City.
"My wife and I are passionate about training Olympians,” Fong said.
"We call it our life’s work. Everything we do from the business we
have to the lifestyle we lead is driven around that.”
Call their house and if they aren’t home, Fong’s message on the
voicemail tells it all: "Sorry you missed us, we’re out, busy
training Olympians.”
In 2004, the duo placed Courtney McCool and Terin Humphrey on the
squad that took a silver medal at the Athens Games. Humphrey also won
a silver on uneven bars.
With the Beijing Olympics less than a year away, it’s Hong, a
14-year-old California native, who looks like their best prospect for
2008. Hong is a member of the U.S. team that’s going to Germany for
the world championships, which begin next Saturday.
Hong stands out to national team coordinator Martha Karolyi because
of, as Karolyi puts it, "the preciseness, the body lines, the
perfection of the technique and the execution.”
Much of that detail would look familiar to anyone who saw Barutyan
perform in the 1980s.
"Bela says, ‘Armine is like a mini-Martha because of the
perfection,”’ Martha Karolyi says with a laugh, recalling her
husband’s take on Barutyan. "If a finger is not in the right place,
it used to bother me. She seems to be just like that.”
Indeed, Barutyan takes pride in her work.
Which might explain why, when faced with that impossible choice of
taking either her mother’s most precious keepsakes or her own
gymnastics medals on her last trip out of the Soviet Union in 1989,
she wasn’t so quick to leave the medals behind.
The family had earned a pass out of the country because they had
relatives in Los Angeles. It was during a transition phase in the
Soviet Union – toward the end of Perestroika, the largely
unsuccessful attempt to restructure the Russian economy, and just
before a reactionary crackdown that again made it almost impossible
for citizens to leave.
Barutyan said had the family’s papers arrived two or three weeks
later, they would have been stuck in Russia for years. Instead, they
found themselves stuck at security in the airport.
"My mother said, ‘These are my most precious things. I can’t leave
them behind,”’ Barutyan said. "I told her, ‘That’s OK, take them,
and I’ll stay here.’ Because I wasn’t leaving those medals behind.
I’d been through too much to win them.”
It took a few hours, but finally Barutyan’s father found a friend who
knew someone at the KGB and arranged for a bribe to be paid to one of
the security henchmen at the airport. That way, both boxes made it.
It was a victory – the first of many after so many heartbreaks
"She’s arguably the most powerful single female gymnastics coach in
the U.S.,” Fong said. "And now, nobody’s going to take anything away
from her. Not uniforms, not recognition, not anything.”
As for all those Soviets who shunned Barutyan, well, Fong is sure
they know exactly how his wife is doing these days.
"I’m not trying to prove myself. I did that long ago,” Barutyan
said. "I just like to say, ‘See, you didn’t let me do it, but maybe I
can help somebody else do it for another country.’ My husband says
it’s sweet revenge. I don’t know if that sounds harsh or not.”