Motivation Quote by Olga Korbut

Korbut isn’t pitching a tweak to meet scheduling needs; she’s trying to redraw the moral map of elite sport. Her “very simple way” proposal - split Olympic competition into under-16 and over-16 - is plainspoken, almost clumsy in English, but the bluntness is the point. It reads like an athlete talking past bureaucratic euphemisms and straight at the problem everyone sees: children’s bodies being treated like short-term projects in a long-term industry.

The subtext is an indictment of what women’s gymnastics became after Korbut helped popularize it. She was the teenage phenomenon of the 1972 Olympics, celebrated for playfulness and vulnerability as much as difficulty. In the decades that followed, the incentives sharpened: smaller, younger, more pliable athletes; earlier specialization; pressure-cooker training systems; careers that peak before adulthood. Her age line (“until sixteen, and after sixteen”) isn’t just administrative - it’s a demand that we admit there are two different sports happening under one banner. One is youth competition. The other is adult competition. Pretending they’re the same lets federations reap the spectacle while offloading the risk.

Korbut’s phrasing also carries a veteran’s fatigue. She’s not offering a detailed policy memo; she’s signaling that the current setup forces unnatural choices - athletes racing puberty, coaches gaming development, viewers cheering difficulty while ignoring the human cost. The emotional force comes from her authority: she benefits least from changing the rules now, which makes the appeal feel less like nostalgia and more like a reckoning.