by John Gessner
Thisweek Newspapers

Olga Gostmanova-Koval and Nadia Comaneci tied for second in the vault at the 1975 Olympic Tryout Championships in Montreal.

But Comaneci, the Romanian gymnast, would soon give Gostmanova-Koval's Russian team and other international competitors fits as they tried to stop her amazing rise to the top.

"Nadia comes up and gymnastics starts to change," Gostmanova-Koval recalled. "Everybody starts to do these harder skills and trick skills and lose their gracefulness."

Now 45, the Russian native teaches young gymnasts the "tricks" they need to compete along with the statuesque grace of the sport she knew growing up.

In November Gostmanova-Koval opened a school, Dynamics Gymnastics Center, at 3176 W. County Road 42 in Burnsville. The Eagan resident coaches students ages 3 to 14, most of them girls.

"They have to be graceful," said the longtime coach and judge. "They have to be pretty."

Gostmanova-Koval was born and raised in the former Leningrad, where her mother, Luda, was a gymnastics coach.

"I liked jumping around. That's it," Gostmanova-Koval said. "You don't think about some high result. You just do what you like to do."

She was selected for the Russian national junior team at age 13 or 14 and soon made the U.S.S.R. national team. She lived the focused life of a Russian teenage gymnast.

"The Americans are more mature sooner than us," Gostmanova-Koval said. "They have to have a lot of information about everything. In Russia, there wasn't a lot of information about anything. We were kind of quiet little kids."

School was in the afternoon, sandwiched between twice-daily practices.

"We were waiting for Sunday," Gostmanova-Koval said, laughing at the memory. "Like, ‘When will it be Sunday? A day off.' It was kind of a job."

But she and her teammates traveled the world, a luxury beyond reach of most of their countrymen.

In addition to her silver medal in the Olympic tryout meet, Gostmanova-Koval won a silver medal in the vault at the 1975 World Cup and earned the title Master of Sport at the 1975 U.S.S.R. National Championships.

She was an alternate on the 1976 Soviet Olympic team.

"There were big names like Olga Korbut," Gostmanova-Koval said. "It was hard to make a team."

Knowing her best days were behind her, she quit competitive gymnastics at 19, before the 1980 Olympics. She got a college degree in physical education and coached for a while in Moscow before marrying and moving to the Belarus city of Minsk, where she and husband Sergei's two sons were born.

She coached the Belarusian national team and earned her international judging certification. In 1995, Gostmanova-Koval and her family came to Minnesota, where the Belarusian head coach had arranged a coaching job for her at a gymnastics school.

Gostmanova-Koval worked for three schools, all of which eventually went out of business.

"So then I think, ‘OK, maybe I have to try to do something on my own,' " said Gostmanova-Koval, whose husband, a former Russian national soccer player, drives a school bus and coaches soccer part time. "It's very hard to say and to predict what will be. Just try! You never know if you don't try. My motivation is to have my job security."

At least one parent predicts a bright future for Dynamics Gymnastics based on the coach's work with his daughters.

Gostmanova-Koval is patient and supportive but firm, said Richard Greiner Jr. His youngest daughter, Jessica, is a student of Gostmanova-Koval's, as was older daughter Katie before she suffered a back problem.

"I think the different culture helps her to be more directed in her coaching," said Greiner, of Inver Grove Heights. "She tends to be very straightforward. She doesn't beat around the bush. With our older daughter we kind of had to explain that if Olga gets after her when she's not doing something quite right, it's because she wants her to do her best. It's nothing personal."

After opening her 8,000-square-foot gym in November Gostmanova-Koval began attracting new students in early 2007.

"Not very many," she laughed when asked the school's enrollment. "But it's enough for us right now. Because I know the first year's going to be hard."

For more information about Dynamics Gymnastics, call (952) 808-0275 or visit www.dynamicsgym.com.

John Gessner is at burnsville.thisweek@ecm-inc.com.