A TOUGH ROUTINE : Rhythmic Gymnasts Try to Overcome Obscurity in U.S.

The words painted on the gym wall said “El Segundo High School,” but the scene looked more like one for an ABC-TV “Up Close and Personal” on American rhythmic gymnasts.

Ten little girls, with names such as Irina and Marina, were leaping and tumbling across a huge mat, tossing ropes and hoops and ribbons 30 feet up to the rafters, trying to catch them on the fly.

All the girls, all the ribbons, all the hoops--all at the same time.

In the middle of this circus, at center mat, you might say, a girl dressed in a chic black cowboy outfit was half finished with her routine, twirling a rope to the “Mexican Hat Dance,” when she missed and the rope snapped out of her hands. She stopped and stared at the ground.

Coach Alla Svirsky, sitting atop bleachers stacked against the wall, hit the stop button on the cassette recorder and let out a sigh.

“What is wrong with you today?” Svirsky asked. “You have no feeling. Why you stop routine?”

“I feel sick,” said the girl, staring unhappily at Svirsky.

A short pause. A deep sigh.

“Next,” Svirsky said.

Tiny 10-year-old Irina Top took the mat and began to dance and twirl her 19-foot ribbon. She tossed it up, did a front roll, and caught it easily. But Svirsky again stopped the music.

“Irina, why you not do double roll?” she asked. “You can do so easily. We do not want a stone-age performance.”

In the corner, working quietly with Svirsky’s assistant coach, was 22-year-old Marina Kunyavsky. When Top finished, it was Kunyavsky’s turn to take the mat. All the younger girls stopped to watch.

Kunyavsky, a three-time U.S. champion from Culver City, demonstrated with a hoop what rhythmic gymnastics is supposed to be--a beautiful, flowing string of movements to music, exhibiting coordination, timing and flexibility.

“The rhythmic gymnastics rules state you cannot do regular gymnastic movements in your routines,” Svirsky said.

“The movement must be different. It requires less upper-body strength than gymnastics, but more endurance. The routines last a minute 30 seconds, and you must be very flexible, very strong, both physically and mentally, and have good ear for music.”

Rhythmic gymnastics, though included by the United States Gymnastics Federation as an event in the total gymnastics repertoire, is entirely different than regular--termed artistic-- gymnastics.

Rhythmic combines dramatic acrobatic and tumbling movements with ballet and modern dance. But that’s just part of it. In a rhythmic floor-exercise routine, leaps and other acrobatics are timed to allow for catching the hoops, ribbons, clubs or balls thrown up to 40 feet, and single ropes are used not only for jumping, but to lasso a leg and form a perpendicular split.

Rhythmic movements alone would be difficult, but the coordination with the equipment increases the difficulty. Ironically, though, the balls, ribbons and such seem to instigate criticism. Some see rhythmic gymnastics as more of a juggling act than an athletic event.

“The rhythmic movements are very feminine,” Svirsky said. “When done right, like in Bulgaria and Russia, it gives chill.”

And when done wrong, it gives laughter.

So, OK, here it is. A story basically nobody has been waiting for, which matches the sport in this country. Rhythmic gymnastics, which will make its debut as a medal event in the Seoul Olympics, has been in a struggle for respect and popularity in America.

Some who saw or read about rhythmic gymnastics as a demonstration sport in the 1984 Olympics may remember it cynically, recalling ribbons getting caught in air-conditioning units and other mishaps.

But not everybody was laughing. Rhythmic gymnastics, solely a women’s event, had not been included in the Olympics since the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne, Australia. So the sport’s supporters were hoping that the television exposure would increase the interest in and popularity of the sport in America.

Yet the 1984 Olympics did little to further the rhythmic cause, or to help the reputation of American rhythmic gymnasts, who performed poorly. Of the 55,000 gymnasts registered with the U.S. Gymnastics Federation, only 588 are rhythmic, up slightly from 528 at the end of 1984.

“The television coverage was terrible,” said Svirsky, a Soviet immigrant who coached the 1984 U.S. team.

“The air-conditioner (in the gym) was a big problem. It blew straight down on the ribbons and caused mistakes. So instead of showing the beauty of the sport, television showed the mistakes in slow motion and made a big deal about it.

“In Europe, you cannot get ticket to finals of rhythmic gymnastics. And, in Japan, rhythmic gymnasts are like Elvis Presley. You cannot get through gym without people following you, asking for autographs.”

In Bulgaria and the Soviet Union, which did not compete in the 1984 Summer Games, rhythmic gymnastics is even more popular. Bulgaria’s Bianca Panova is the top-ranked rhythmic gymnast, having won the 1987 World Championship.

But this is America, where the word gymnastics sparks images of triple-flip twists off the uneven bars and back flips to splits on a 4-inch beam--strength we have learned to love and respect, performed by little girls with ribbon-tied ponytails and Mary Lou Retton-type bobs.

“Rhythmic gymnastics is a tough sell in the West,” said Jan Claire, director of membership services for the USGF.

“In Eastern European culture, children are brought up with classical music and an understanding of dance and the skill required to perform. When they see a rhythmic gymnast with a rope performing to a solo violin, they appreciate the difficulty the gymnast faces as well as the mechanics of playing a violin. A lot of that is lost in the aggressive West.”

Ironically, Svirsky said, it was an American who started the rhythmic craze. Isadora Duncan, the famous dancer, delighted crowds in Russia in the 1920s as she danced around the stage with scarfs.

“Duncan introduced the sport to the Russian people,” Svirsky said. “Russia loved the ballet and dance anyway. Next thing, thousands of people would perform on stage with scarfs. And in Germany, they were dancing with clubs.”

A love for dance and music is the reason cited by Kunyavsky and other rhythmic gymnasts in having chosen rhythmic over artistic.

Kunyavsky, one of four Soviet immigrants Svirsky coaches, learned her sport in the Soviet Union, but said she was only allowed to compete there locally because she is a Jew. She and her family came to America in 1981, seven years after Svirsky and her husband, also both Jews, left the Soviet Union for the United States. Kunyavsky began training with Svirsky here.

Svirsky, the 1956 Soviet national champion in artistic gymnastics, also made the switch to rhythmic because she loves to dance, something that had always been a part of her life. In the Soviet Union, each kindergarten class had its own piano and its own piano player.

So when Svirsky and her husband came here in 1974, she and a partner opened the Los Angeles School of Gymnastics in Culver City, where she currently teaches artistic gymnastics.

She tried to coach rhythmic gymnastics there, too, but the ceiling isn’t high enough. When a couple of girls got hurt after the Indian clubs they had thrown bounced off the ceiling and hit them, Svirsky was off to find a gym with a high ceiling.

“I have never worked so hard as I do now in the United States,” Svirsky said. “The United States does not provide facilities to train. So, every day I spend time on the phone trying to find a place to practice for the next day. Last month my phone bill was $180, just from calling the girls to tell them where they were going to practice the next day.”

Svirsky’s top 10 rhythmic gymnasts practice five to six hours each day, six or seven days a week. So finding a place to practice with a 50-foot ceiling is no easy chore. UCLA officials let her use its gym free for two years, but then told her they would have to charge her $55 an hour. Since then, she has practiced wherever possible, in high school gyms, churches, recreation buildings. Every day it’s a different place.

Recently, Svirsky’s gym in Culver City was broken into five times in one week. Gone are her videocassette recorder, her camera, and even some money that she accidentally left in the office in the flurry of leaving for the U.S. national championship meet, held last weekend in San Rafael.

Then, because she couldn’t find a place to practice in Los Angeles the week before the national competition, she took her students to San Rafael early to use the training facilities there. But even that didn’t work.

Svirsky said she went to San Rafael on Sunday, spent the money for hotel and everything, just so she could have a good solid day of practice on Monday.

“But on Monday we went to gym, and the lady who was supposed to open it up didn’t show up,” Svirsky said. “She forgot--after we had arranged everything. And then I couldn’t find her, she was in some business meeting or something. I wanted to cry.

“This sport will not grow in America until we have permanent facilities to practice and become good.”

The top eight finishers in the 1988 national championships will compete for two spots on the 1988 Olympic team. Four of Svirsky’s students qualified--Kunyavsky, who finished second; Alexandria Feldman of Sherman Oaks, who was fourth; Eugenia Yuan of San Marino, fifth, and Irina Rubinshtein of Agoura, sixth.

The Olympic trials will be held in Salt Lake City, Utah, in late July.

Svirsky, who lives in Hollywood, and Irina Vdovets, of Chicago, are the top two rhythmic coaches in America. Vdovets coaches the two other top-ranked Americans, 1988 U.S. national champion Diane Simpson of Evanston, Ill., and Michelle Berube of Detroit, who finished third in this year’s national competition and was a member of the 1984 Olympic rhythmic gymnastics team.

“The girls (each) spend about $10,000 a year in training, costumes, etc.,” Svirsky said.

“In this country, once you make nationals, the Olympic committee pays your way. But you have to have money to get good. It’s crazy.”