Beyond Selidor

I'd never even heard of her before seeing the video, but she sounds like an amazing person.

I'm not really a sports fan either, partly because of the way Australians are about sport (which is a whole other blog post that I may write at some point), apart from gymnastics. But my husband is a huge, huge sports fan (of women's and men's sports) and I guess some of it has rubbed off on me. Certainly I can appreciate that video, which made me very weepy, and, like you, made me want to read about all the women featured in the video. I'm particularly interested in the intersection of sports and politics (particularly during the Cold War), which it appears featured in a lot of those women's experiences.

Women's gymnasstics is so, so messed up, and the US women's gymnastics team has had some truly awful coaches over the years. I don't think I actually watched that particular Olympics team event live (although weirdly, my gym coach in the last few years that I was a gymnast actually competed for the Australian women's team in Atlanta), but I remember hearing about it later and being completely appalled. The truly messed up thing is that even without Strug's second vault the US team would have won!