Uploaded March 2020 | Updated September 2026, 50 minutes ago
Here is another 'before they were famous' post and another from the endless stable of stars created in Karl Marx Stadt in the GDR. I think Frau Muller was chanelling Sonja Henie here when she packaged Sonja Morgenstern for her Olympic debut aged just 13.
Sonja is most famous as the first woman to perform a triple jump cleanly in competition (a salchow) which she achieved at the 1971 Europeans in Zurich, repeating the feat at Worlds the same year and in the following season. There had been triples before from ladies but not of the same quality.
Here is another 'before they were famous' post and another from the endless stable of stars created in Karl Marx Stadt in the GDR. I think Frau Muller was chanelling Sonja Henie here when she packaged Sonja Morgenstern for her Olympic debut aged just 13.
Sonja is most famous as the first woman to perform a triple jump cleanly in competition (a salchow) which she achieved at the 1971 Europeans in Zurich, repeating the feat at Worlds the same year and in the following season. There had been triples before from ladies but not of the same quality.
![Marina Cherkasova & Sergei Shakhrai - 1977 World Championship FS [QUAD TWIST]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/oIFz7aN2H6s/mqdefault.jpg "Marina Cherkasova & Sergei Shakhrai - 1977 World Championship FS [QUAD TWIST]
This has only previously been shared previously as a partial recording, so here is the complete programme including the first ever quad twist completed at a world championships. Their debut was controversial due to the profound size differene between the two and they quickly became known as a one-and-a-half pair. Their coach Stanislav Zhuk continued to pair tiny girls with fully grown men with considerable success paving teh way for the most famous of the one-and-a-half pairs, at least in their earliest days, Gordeeva & Grinkov.")
