Larisa Latynina won world titles while four months pregnant
At the 1958 World Championships, Larisa Latynina took five of the six gold medals on offer and reached the podium in every event, all while four months pregnant. Two years later she was back at the Olympics, winning again. Her career total of 18 Olympic medals stood unbeaten for 48 years.
She was born Larisa Diriy on 27 December 1934 in Kherson, in Soviet Ukraine. Her father left when she was 11 months old and was later killed at Stalingrad as a machine gunner, and her mother, who could not read, worked as a cleaner by day and a watchman by night. The girl lived through the German occupation. She started in ballet, switching to gymnastics only when her choreographer left town, and trained first under Mykhailo Sotnychenko.
After finishing school with a gold medal in 1953 she moved to Kyiv to study and train. At 19 she made her international debut at the 1954 World Championships in Rome, helping win team gold. Her Olympic debut came in Melbourne in 1956, aged 21, where she won the all-around title, the vault and the team event, plus two silvers. She gave that first Olympic gold to her original coach, who kept it until he died; his widow later returned it. A clean sweep of the 1957 European titles earned her the Order of Lenin.
At Rome in 1960 she led a Soviet sweep of the top four all-around places and defended her floor title. She beat Czechoslovakia's Věra Čáslavská for the 1962 world all-around crown, though Čáslavská turned the tables at Tokyo in 1964. Even so, Latynina won the team and floor events for a third straight Games, finishing with nine golds, five silvers and four bronzes. She medalled in every Olympic event she entered except the 1956 beam, where she placed fourth.
Her nine golds remain the most by any female gymnast, a total matched among women only by swimmer Katie Ledecky. From 1964 until 2012 nobody owned more Olympic medals of any colour, and she is the only woman who has ever topped the all-time list for golds. No other woman has won the floor exercise, or an all-around medal, across more than two Olympics.
Source: Larisa Latynina
