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What: “Biography: Olga Korbut”

Where: A&E;, tonight, 8

The Arts and Entertainment Network gets into the Olympic spirit with a profile of the darling of the 1972 Olympics, Soviet gymnast Olga Korbut, on its award-winning “Biography” series tonight. Then on “Investigative Reports” tonight and Thursday at 10, A&E; probes two prominent Olympic scandals--the doping of athletes and the bribing of IOC members. All three programs are highly recommended.

Korbut moved to the Atlanta area in 1991 and lives there now, although she recently divorced and remarried. She has a 21-year-old son. The years have not been kind to her. She is 45, but looks much older. She does part of the interview in English and part in Russian, with closed-captions used to interpret.

A focal point of her biography is her stormy relationship with her coach, Renald Knysh, whom she left shortly after a poor showing at the 1976 Olympics. She retired from gymnastics the next year.

“As a person, he was a bad man,” Korbut says of Knysh. “As a coach, he was a genius.”

Korbut accuses Knysh of having forced her to have sex with him before the ’72 Olympics. “It was sex without love, it was my first time,” she says in English. “It is rape if you don’t want it and are not in love.”

“She’s lying,” Knysh says. “It’s the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard.”

Korbut says she has no proof--”Nobody saw us”--but she says she has decided to come forth for the first time to “show life as it really is.”

Knysh: “We coaches have a saying, ‘Every pupil ends up spitting on your soul.’ ”

Korbut also accuses Knysh of having beaten her, but Knysh says he slapped her only once “and she has hated me ever since.” Knysh says he treated her gently, but in the same breath says he treated her “the same way a trainer treats monkeys in a circus.”

The conflicts between Korbut and Knysh are only part of Korbut’s story. There’s much to tell of this woman who, at 17, revolutionized women’s gymnastics and changed it from a minor Olympic sport to possibly the No. 1 Olympic sport.