Motivation Quote by Olga Korbut

Korbut is talking in the half-staccato of someone translating not just language but a whole bodily experience: being told what a gymnast should look like, then showing up and changing the terms anyway. The line is full of self-contradiction that feels honest rather than polished: "total skinny... small... very strong". That triad is the point. She is naming a physique that doesn’t read as powerful in the old, officially sanctioned way, then insisting on the strength inside it.

The stray "they may be don't like to see a gymnastics like that" carries the real heat. "They" is doing a lot of work: judges, coaches, federations, the Soviet sports machine, maybe even audiences expecting graceful prettiness over risk. Korbut hints at resistance without staging herself as a lone hero; she presents it as atmosphere, a suspicion you can’t quite prove but can feel in the scoring and the whisper network.

Her 1972 marker isn’t nostalgia, it’s a thesis about spectacle and permission. Munich was when her daring, emotive style (and the compact, adolescent body that performed it) became globally legible: gymnastics as drama, not just execution; athleticism that looked almost too human, too vulnerable, to be "correct". The broken syntax mirrors the cultural break she’s describing. Change didn’t arrive as an announcement. It arrived as a body doing something the rulebook hadn’t emotionally prepared people to see.