In women’s artistic gymnastics (WAG) conventional wisdom dictates that the Olympic All-Around (AA) will feature the hardest and toughest lineup of gymnasts (start list) in any given Olympic quad. This is where all the great gymnasts of various nations get their chance to simultaneously battle each other with the most prestigious individual gold medal in WAG on the line.

But two months before the 1976 Olympics there was a national competition involving a single WAG program that had so many talented gymnasts in the field, it was as talent-rich as your typical AA Finals. The competition in question was the 1976 USSR Cup and the easiest way to explain why this competition was so legendary is because it didn’t only showcase the gymnasts who were currently carrying the Soviet WAG program, but the gymnasts who would soon take over the reins in the next Olympic quad.

The 1976 Soviet Olympic team that went to Montreal was one of its greatest teams of all-time. But the Soviet selection process was unusual in that all the gymnasts who “missed the cut” didn’t fade away into obscurity. Many of them became future legends and would go on to be the defining faces of the sport over the next five years. Throughout all the times Soviet, American, Russian, and Romanian WAG held an Olympic trials (or a process close to it), the 1976 USSR team selection process is unusual in that it featured the defining faces of the current Olympic quad, but also the quad that came afterwards. Effectively creating a single-competition that had the makeup of two Olympic teams.

Below I made a graphic that visualizes all the gymnasts in attendance:

Some statistics regarding the 1976 USSR Cup:

(A) It featured eight gymnasts who are currently members of the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame. This one Soviet competition featured almost as many Hall of Fame gymnasts (8) as Romania has produced in its entire history (9). The same can be said for the United States which also has nine WAGs in the Hall of Fame.

(B) The 1976 USSR Cup featured eight Olympians who went to the Olympics a combined 14 times. Every single gymnast who finished in the top-five at this competition has multiple Olympic appearances. It also featured the Soviet alternate at the 1972 (Nina Dronova) and 1976 Olympics (Lidia Gorbik).

(C) Outside of the previously mentioned Olympians and Hall of Fame gymnasts, there were an additional five former child prodigies who each achieved a #1 international ranking in junior competition. All five of them had won Druzhba, a de facto Junior World Championships held annually from 1965-1989.

(D) Of the 15 highest scoring gymnasts at the 1976 USSR Cup, 13 of them won an AA medal in senior-level and/or junior-level competition. As for the two gymnasts who didn’t, they were 4th place finishers who also have Olympic gold medals. This means that every gymnast in the top-15 was either a highly successful senior, or a former child prodigy at the junior level.

Another compelling aspect of the 1976 USSR Cup is that regardless of how you measure it, it was an embarrassment of riches. Its three best gymnasts of Nellie Kim, Olga Korbut, and Ludmilla Turischeva is arguably the greatest trio of gymnasts any team has ever had. But when looking at the rest of the program, every gymnast in its top-16 was either a highly regarded junior, or a highly decorated senior.

But the most important point to note is that virtually every gymnast in attendance was in the prime of her career. Normally, when you get so many gymnasts who have highly accomplished career resumes, many of them are either old worn out veterans who no longer have much to contribute, or young gymnasts at the very start of their career who will only be relevant in the future.

That wasn’t the case in 1976 as all the gymnasts in question were either currently in the prime years of their career, or very close to it. None of the famed gymnasts in attendance were “glorified participants.” There are at least 16 gymnasts from this competition who could have qualified to Olympic AA Finals if they didn’t have to worry about country limits and team size.

At the top was the famed trio of Nellie, Korbut, and Turischeva. To use Nadia Comaneci as a benchmark, she won 28 medals in her career at the four major competitions of the era. Nellie Kim won 29, Turischeva won 39, while Olga Korbut sits at 14 medals. When counting only Group-1 medals (World Championships and Olympics), these gymnasts are the 5th (Turischeva), 9th (Nellie Kim), and 22nd (Korbut) most decorated gymnasts in WAG history.

It was the most accomplished trio any program has put together, and such a triple-threat will likely never occur again in WAG. The rest of the 1976 Olympic team with Svetlana Grozdova, Elvira Saadi, and Maria Filatova rounded out one of the most “complete” Olympic teams of all time. In Olympic AA Qualifying all six Soviet gymnasts finished in the top-9, albeit in a tie for 9th place.

Two of the gymnasts who didn’t make the Olympic team were Nina Dronova and Lyubov Yudina. Nina was a gymnast I nicknamed the “Nadia before Nadia” and had arguably the 2nd most dominant junior career after Nadia Comaneci in WAG history. Her life story is so fascinating that I wrote a whole article on just the first half of her career. Nina is the kind of gymnast where you need to dedicate a whole chapter in a book to do her story justice.

The same could be said for Yudina, another gymnast who really needs a book chapter worth of coverage just to properly explain how fascinating of a gymnast she was. But to sum up Yudina’s reputation as a gymnast who packed her routines with as many unique and outrageously difficult skills as possible, here is an excerpt of her from a 1974 competition report.

“Lyubov Yudina, a 13-year-old who performed a triple twist on floor! That must be read again – three rotations in the longitudinal axis! This happened only once in the men’s competition”

Then there was the trio of Hall of Fame gymnasts who were contributing top-routines in 1976, but were left off the Olympic team because the Soviets didn’t have enough room for them. The first was Elena Davydova, the gymnast who would miss the 1976 Olympics only to come back guns blazing and win the All-Around at the 1980 Olympics. Next to her was Davydova’s contemporary Natalia Shaposhnikova. She would be one of the most influential gymnasts in the development of the uneven bars. Whereas Davydova was the highest scoring Soviet in 1980 AA Finals, it was Shaposhnikova who was the highest scoring Soviet in 1980 AA qualifications.

And then there was Elena Mukhina, the gymnast who dominated competition reports in the first half of 1976. In one report, Mukhina was labeled a sensation without exaggeration. Creating another dilemma for the Soviets of what to do with a complete unknown who was rapidly shooting up the ranks of the Soviet program. By late 1976, it would become apparent that Mukhina was going to become the new Soviet #1. That assertion would ring true when Mukhina won the 1978 World Championships and was the highest scoring Soviet at the 1977 European Championships.

Even the obscure Soviets at the 1976 USSR Cup were incredible. In the #14 spot was Marina Ostanina, the winner of 1974 Druzhba. In doing so she beat out Steffi Kraker, a Hall of Fame gymnast from East Germany who has as many medals as Aly Raisman and was one of the most successful gymnasts of the 1970s. But also, Teodora Ungureanu, another Hall of Fame gymnast from Romania who finished 4th in the AA at the 1976 Olympics.

Behind her in the #15 spot was Raisa Bichukina who won 1972 Druzhba. Among the gymnasts she beat was future Soviet great Nellie Kim and Nadia Comaneci. Raisa Bichukina can technically say she was the first Soviet to ever beat Nadia. Although in Nadia’s defense, she was only ten years old at the time.

But Raisa Bichukina has a win over two other famed Romanian gymnasts. In 1974 she beat both Elena Ceampelea and Anca Grigoras in the same competition. Ceampelea competed in three Olympic quads, qualified to the AA Finals at the 1974 World Championships, and was one of Romania’s most legendary gymnasts of the pre-Nadia era. Anca Grigoras was a 2x Olympian (1972 and 1976) who finished 12th in the AA at the 1974 World Championships.

Not only did Raisa beat two of Romania’s best in this very same year, but she beat them on Romanian soil. Beating any gymnast on her home turf is a formidable task, but beating Romanian gymnasts in Romania was an accomplishment in a league of its own. Due to the nature of the Romanian dictatorship, Romanian competitions were especially egregious when it came to judges overscoring the home team. Foreign gymnasts finding success in Romania was virtually impossible. Which makes Bichukina’s performance a compelling result that she was able to accomplish such a feat.

Raisa Bichukina and Marina Ostanina were two highly compelling gymnasts who easily could have become Olympians had they belonged to any other WAG program. Normally when two gymnasts of such renowned talent finish 14th and 15th, the assumption is that they had a fall and recorded abnormally low scores. Their final result not reflecting how good they truly were. But in the case of Ostanina and Bichukina, they genuinely were the 14th and 15th best gymnasts at the 1976 USSR Cup because there was simply so much talent ahead of them.

In the #6 spot was Lidia Gorbik and in the #11 spot was Lyubov Bogdanova. On the uneven bars, Bogdanova had been performing Mukhina’s trademark full-twisting Korbut flip for as long as Mukhina had been. Bogdanova was one of the gymnasts hanging in the shadows of the Soviet lineup in the early part of the quad. The gymnast not good enough to make the final six-person lineup, but just good enough to be one of its most important gymnasts who wasn’t given the honor of a spot on the team.

Lidia Gorbik served a similar role later on in the 1973-1976 Olympic quad. Although in Gorbik’s case, only by the narrowest of margins did she miss out on becoming an Olympian. Gorbik had been an alternate at both the 1974 World Championships and the 1976 Olympics. Lidia Gorbik and #16 Olga Koval were both veterans of the 1975 World Cup which was an unofficial World Championships lineup for Soviet WAG.

This is why I included Olga Koval even though she finished 16th at the USSR Cup and the 15 gymnasts who finished above her all have iconic results at either Druzhba or the World Championships/Olympics. Olga Koval does not. Yet I still insisted on expanding the focus of this article to highlight the 16-best gymnasts at the 1976 USSR Cup because it would be criminal to exclude Koval.

Olga Koval was part of the “new wave,” the Soviet quartet of young promising juniors that were old enough to compete in Montreal. Its other three members were Maria Filatova, Elena Davydova, and Natalia Shaposhnikova. Whereas the other three are all Hall of Fame gymnasts, Olga Koval did not enjoy the same level of success. Although Koval’s appearance at the 1975 World Cup is an indication that had there been a World Championships that year, the Soviets likely would have selected Koval for a lineup spot.

Koval’s legacy is her membership to one of the most iconic junior classes of all time, while sadly being the only one to not enjoy major success at the senior level. But Koval clearly had talent and in 1975 the Soviets had even given Olga Koval first priority over Filatova, Shaposhnikova and Davydova when it came to team assignments. Olga Koval finished 4th on floor and won a silver medal on vault at the 1975 World Cup. She also attended the 1975 Pre-Olympics where she finished 4th in the All-Around.

The only gymnasts who had beaten Koval at the 1975 Pre-Olympics are all members of the Hall of Fame and finished in the top-4 at the 1976 Olympics. Olga Koval is widely considered one of the most talented gymnasts of her generation, she simply wasn’t able to enjoy success because of a growth spurt and possessing the wrong body type for her generation. In my profile of Olga Koval which can be found here, I described her as a 1960s gymnast who was stuck in the 1970s.

The 1976 USSR Cup was one of the most legendary encounters of so many superstar gymnasts. All the gymnasts present appeared in peak form and were competing as part of a high-stakes competition with an Olympic spot on the line. It was one of WAG’s greatest collections of talent, while also occurring under circumstances where everyone was going to show up in their absolute best condition with Montreal so near.

But the reason the 1976 USSR Cup is so important in the larger context of WAG history is because of the gymnast who wasn’t there, Nadia Comaneci. Despite all the talent that was present at the 1976 USSR Cup, and the Soviet reputation for possessing so many of the best gymnasts in the world, they didn’t have the most iconic and most unstoppable gymnast of the era.

That is what makes 1976 so special. It gave women’s gymnastics a storyline of the best individual gymnast going against the best gymnastics team that could ever be assembled. It went beyond a legendary WAG moment, but a legendary sports moment that such a storyline could ever exist. The 1976 USSR Cup set the stage for one of WAG’s most memorable showdowns while also serving as a memory of just how much a single program can achieve.