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Oksana Chusovitina
At 41, Chusovitina is the oldest athlete at the Rio Olympics. Her first Olympics appearance was at the 1992 Barcelona games. Simone Biles, who she will compete with, was not even born then. But Chusovitina is not simply the oldest at what she does, she is one of the role models young girls going into gymnastics have been able to look up to for years.
It is almost impossible to overstate the value of her life in building her status as a living legend of gymnastics. Not only did she represent three countries – the Unified team, Germany, and now Uzbekistan – in the course of her 25 years long career, the story of her return to elite gymnastics as a mother of a child whose cancer led her to move countries is no less significant.
A vault specialist who is exceptionally neat in her sticks, Chusovitina is an Olympic gold medallist with the most number of world championship medals in vault. Over the years, her focused yet unsmiling firmness on the mat has been as much an integral part of artistic gymnastics as her sustained presence on the podium.
