Svetlana Boginskaya

Svetlana Leonidovna Boginskaya is a former artistic gymnast who represented the Soviet Union and later Belarus, born on 9 February 1973 in Minsk. She is a three-time Olympic champion, with an individual gold medal on vault from the 1988 Summer Olympics and team gold medals from the 1988 and 1992 Games. She took up gymnastics at age six after watching Nadia Comaneci compete, practised figure skating before that, and moved to Moscow two years later to train full time at the Round Lake Gymnastics Center. She won the 1986 European Junior Championships and made her senior World Championships debut in 1987, taking bronze on balance beam.