Raisa Smetanina’s rise to Olympic prominence was, suitably for a cross-country skier, slow and arduous. However, her accomplishments in this respect are nearly unparalleled in Olympic history. It all started in 1976, in the city of Innsbruck.
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First Woman To Win 10 Olympic Medals
Smetanina, a 23-year-old physical education teacher from Mokhcha, Kome in the north-west of the Soviet Union, collected two gold medals in the Nordic skiing events – her first successes on her way to becoming the first woman to win 10 Olympic medals, a haul of four golds, five silvers and one bronze.
Cross-country skiing is a demanding sport. Individual competitors in the five-, ten-, and twenty-kilometer time trials leave the starting gates 30 seconds apart.
The sport includes of classical races, when skiers employ a diagonal stride, and freestyle, which has no constraints on technique and is faster.
Skiers now use computers to choose which skis and wax to use for each day of competition, and etiquette dictates that a skier who is being passed must move over and yell “Track!”
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It’s Hardly Surprising That Smetanina
A full-time nurse, would have the stamina to win so many Nordic skiing races; but, the fact that she collapsed from weariness two years after Innsbruck at a World Cup competition does offer some notion of the pressures skiers confront.
The 4x5km relay gold medal she won at the 1974 Nordic World Ski Championships in Falun, Sweden was her only previous major accomplishment before Innsbruck.
However, she started her Olympic journey with a silver medal in the 5km race in Innsbruck, falling short of the gold by only one second.
Then she earned the top spot in 30:13:41 in the women’s 10km classical event, leading practically all the way and beating Helena Takalo of Finland by 47s. The 5km was where Takalo exacted her vengeance, narrowly edging out her Soviet opponent.
Smetanina also swam for the Soviet Union’s women’s 4x5km freestyle relay team, which won gold by finishing only a fraction of a second ahead of the Finnish runners-up. Like Rosi Mittermaier of West Germany, she finished the games as the top athlete.
She went on to win three gold medals at the Holmenkollen ski festival and four gold medals at the FIS Nordic World Ski Championships, where she competed in the 20-kilometer and four-by-five-kilometer distances.
Smetanina was awarded the Holmenkollen medal in 1979, the sport’s highest honour, and the Order of Friendship of Peoples medal from the Russian Federation in 1984.
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The Physical Education Teacher Competed in Four More Winter Olympics,
The last being 1992 in Albertville, when she earned a bronze medal in the 4×5 km event at the age of 39 years, 2 months, and 7 days, making her the oldest female Winter Games medalist ever.
