Dishing the dirt

Our television critic's weekly squint at what's best on the boxReputations Tuesday, 9pm, BBC2 Olga Korbut was the darling of gymnastics in the early Seventies. But was there a more sinister tale behind her success? The first part of a new BBC2 series investigates The blueprint for Reputations is to dish the dirt on a well-known person, showing that public reputation and private life were out of step. You know the kind of thing: St Francis of Assisi pulled the wings of flies as a kid; Winston Churchill was a Nazi sympathiser.

In the first of a new series, Reputations takes another squint at the extraordinary life of Olga Korbut, the Soviet gymnast who won over a global audience with her daring tumbles and flirty smile. By her second and final Olympics in Montreal in 1976, Korbut's career was effectively over - at the age of 21. But not before this symbol of Soviet might had become a big hit in the free world, an audience entranced by the extraordinary athleticism of a woman in a pre- pubescent girl's body.

The title of the film - The Gymnast, Her Coach, Her Rival and the President - offers a hint about who was really manipulating whom. Although Olga Korbut's reputation is supposed to be reassessed here, it is the role of her coach, Renald Knysh, which is really under scrutiny. He was "a loner, a despot, a weirdo", says Korbut, who talks publicly about their relationship for the first time.

This version of their relationship confirms the suspicions one has of older men whose ambitions are channelled through young, female sports prodigies. Korbut says that, in effect, Knysh raped her by using his total dominance over his life to coerce her into bed. "She is lying," says Knysh simply.

A further allegation is that Korbut was fed drugs to delay puberty in the young champion. Before little Olga, female gymnasts were curvy women - not Rubenesque, perhaps, but not Kate Moss either. Korbut says she doesn't know if she was doped, and therein lies the problem of this film: proof, or lack of it.

But as Knysh plausibly argues, why would he devote seven years to preparing his star gymnast for the Olympics, only to sexually abuse in the crucial months before the event? So could it be that she is using the term "rape" as a blunt metaphor for a subtler but equally damaging theft of childhood innocence. It's impossible to know. As the young Korbut adopts that back-arched pose after completing a routine, it's a hard not to see a vivacious girl whose sexuality has been awakened too young. That may even have been part of her public appeal. There is even a creepy moment when Grandstand anchor Frank Bough says: "I feel like I could put my hands round her waist and pop her in my pocket."

Whatever the truth of Korbut's allegations, Bough's comments reveal how she was regarded as a plaything by the male-dominated sports establishment. This ruthless exploitation of young talent was always portrayed as Communist oppression of the individual, but the record of the Yankee dollar in polluting young innocence isn't much better. Think of all those burned-out tennis teens.

So what of Korbut herself? Her bitterness is evident. Dressed in shell suit and wearing trashy designer shades, the flirty girl has grown up into a hard woman, who lives outside Atlanta in a shrine devoted to the young Olga's glory.

Significantly, she left her job as a schools coach amid allegations that she pushed the kids too hard. If true, that would fit the pattern of abused turning abuser. Old footage of Korbut training shows a sullen, girl being drilled with ruthless efficiency.

Reputations portrays Korbut as the product of bizarre childhood, a pawn in a Cold War game. But a wider point is made about the price young sportswomen pay when they fall under the spell of powerful men - and not just their coaches. Knysh was a player in a game devised by (male) politicians and refereed by the (mostly male) Olympic committee.

Keep politics out of sport, they say; keep sport out of politics is the message of Olga Korbut's sad story.

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