BarcelonaWhen Vitali Sxerbo went out to compete at the Palau Sant Jordi, he looked like ice. He fit the stereotypes of what a Soviet gymnast should be like. The only problem is that he was no longer Soviet, although he was competing in a jersey with a hammer and sickle on his chest. Now 30 years ago, Sxerbo (Minsk, 1972) dazzled the world by becoming in Barcelona the only athlete who was not a swimmer capable of winning six gold medals in the same Olympic event. Only Simon Biles, years later, went further than the Belarusian in Barcelona.
The name of Sxerbo was word of mouth in Barcelona, 30 years ago now. The gymnast bought one walkman and he walked proudly among the fans who asked him for autographs on the way to the Foixarda training center, where young Catalan gymnasts watched with open mouths as the gymnasts from the east worked. A few months before the Barcelona Games, the Soviet Union had crumbled. Where once there was a great state, fifteen different republics were now born, some of them torn from within in half-forgotten wars. For years, the organizers of the Barcelona Games worked thinking that they would have the powerful Soviet delegation in the city, but they had to change everything to adapt to history, always in motion. Except for the three Baltic republics, which already competed independently, the other twelve former Soviet republics competed under the name CIS: Commonwealth of Independent States. With the sports uniforms of yesteryear, but with names that spoke to us of a new reality.
In 1991, at the World Championships in Indianapolis, Sxerbo had competed as a Soviet and had won three plants and two bronzes. He was 19 years old and everyone knew he had a great future. He would prove it in Barcelona, where on July 31 he would win the gold medal in the all-around competition, ahead of two of his former compatriots: the Ukrainian Grigori Misiütin and the Azerbaijani Valeri Belenki. 48 hours later, Sxerbo would enter the history books through the big door when in the same day he won four gold medals, in four different devices. In the end, out of eight possible golds in Barcelona, he would win six: the individual all-around competition and the team competition, and the four in the pommel horse with bows, rings, colt jump and parallel bars. One of the children who could see him training was the Catalan gymnast Gervasi Deferr. “It was fun to watch him train. You could see him chip away, because he didn’t have to work as hard as the others. I’d look at him in fascination and he’d wink at me before he got in the rings. But then he was competing and he was a killer, and he booed his teammates. He was the best,” he recalls.
In Barcelona, Sxerbo touched the sky. But then he began a descent into hell. “When I came home everything had changed. Suddenly there was Belarus. They offered me to advertise some brands, and I was young and I enjoyed it. But you couldn’t rest. Before, in Soviet times, they demanded of you but you were calm . Then you had to go to television, to advertising events… I didn’t rest,” he explained five years ago when he returned to Minsk to receive a tribute. One day, after an advertising event, when he returned home he found that his apartment had been stolen. “They took everything. All the money I had saved, the video equipment, technology I had bought abroad. Everything,” explains a Sxerbo who was lucky, since the six gold medals kept at his mother’s house and did not lose them. The lack of security, however, marked the lives of the inhabitants of Minsk. And when a stranger tried to kidnap his daughter, he decided with his wife, Irina, to go live in the United States. “We left without money, as it had been stolen from us. When we arrived, I had to go to exhibitions and events every day to be able to have money. We asked for a loan and little by little we went about our lives.”
His wife’s accident
In December 1995, however, his wife was left in a coma after a horrific car accident. She was shot out of the car. They even gave her up for dead, but after a few months she got away. Sxerbo, who at the time was preparing for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, left training after Irina’s accident. He started drinking alcohol after spending hours in the hospital. More than once there was a fight in roadside bars. But when Irina recovered, she managed to get him back into training. He had to lose more than 15 kg as he had put on a lot of weight. Sxerbo would get four bronze medals at the Atlanta Games. For the public, who knew his story, it was a success, but he seemed disappointed. It was his turn to see up close how new dominators of gymnastics arrived, especially the Russian Aleksei Nemov.
Sxerbo would retire completely when he suffered a motorcycle accident in 1997. He ended up opening a gym in Las Vegas, where he would divorce Irina. He gained weight again. “In America they don’t know how to eat, they have too sedentary a style. I had problems until I understood how they think. Americans always feel like shoppers, so you had to learn to laugh when someone came up to you and demanded that you give preferential treatment to his son in the gym,” said a remarried Sxerbo, before falling into drinking trouble when Ukrainian gymnast Tatiana Gutsu accused him of raping her during training for the World Championships in 1991. Gutsu, who was then 15 years old, told how a drunken Sxerbo gave her something to drink and then abused her. No one helped her, but she found the strength to win the gold medal in the women’s competition at the Barcelona Games in 1992. When the press, looking for a photo of the two champions together, asked Gutsu to pose next to Sxerbo , no one knew the pain it caused the young woman. In 2012, Gutsu agreed with him and, for the first time, reprimanded him for what he had done. But Sxerbo merely told her that no one would believe her. And he kicked her out with insults.
