Gym Dandy

To what the Greeks called gymnastics (originally, "naked art"), the always practical Romans added a characteristic footnote : "It appears to be play, but it is for the fatherland." Until last summer, both ancient definitions were virtually ignored in the U.S., which normally consigns parallel bars and vaulting horses to the far corners of its basketball courts. But when the graceful feats of Olympic-prizewinning Russian muscle maidens were shown on nationwide television, the U.S. gaped in admiration. Here was a new type of individual athletic competition that combined the strength and timing of acrobatics with the beauty of pure ballet. What is more, the girls were pretty.

Last week at West Chester (Pa.) State College, the six-lady Soviet team competed for the first time since the Rome Olympics against the U.S. Women's Olympic gymnastic team. Once again they put on an eye-popping show before an S.R.O. audience of 3,000. Even though trim, blonde Soviet Ace Polina Astakhova, 24, nursed a sore right elbow on the sidelines, her comrades defeated the U.S. team more easily than the 153.199-149.967 score indicated. Led by Team Captain Larisa Latynina, 26, a button-cute pug-nosed mother of a two-year-old daughter, the Russians coolly swept every event except the uneven parallel bars, in which Doris Fuchs, 22, a well-proportioned blonde from Rochester, won the loudest ovation of the evening when she swirled from the top bar, crashed belly first into the lower bar, spun around completely, and landed deftly feet first on the mat. Not to be outdone, 5-ft. 4 1/2-in., 114-lb. Larisa matched Doris the following night with a more violent maneuver known simply as "The Latynina": uncoiling from the low bar to the high bar in incredible contortions, Larisa swung through India-rubber gyrations that left her poised in a handstand on the high bar, then flipped backward in a half somersault and landed perfectly on her feet.

Such technique, which won her two gold medals in Rome, is not perfected easily. Larisa practices two hours at a stretch in a Kiev gym four or five times a week throughout the year, still has time to swim, paint and keep house with the help of her mother and engineer husband. One of the few Russian gymnasts to wear cosmetics, Larisa speaks with animation, shakes her sandy-brown curly head with enthusiasm. If the Russians or the Greeks lacked a word for her, one American did not. "There." a new admirer of gymnastics said last week, "goes a doll."

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