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Irina Viner was the ruthless ruler of Russian rhythmic gymnastics. Then she clashed with her former protégé — and Putin’s rumored girlfriend — Alina Kabaeva.

Source: Meduza

On February 12, Irina Viner, the longtime head coach of Russia’s national rhythmic gymnastics team, announced her resignation. Ten days later, Oleg Belozerov, president of the Russian Gymnastics Federation, confirmed that she would be succeeded by Tatyana Sergaeva, the team’s former senior coach for group exercises. Sergaeva now takes on the task of continuing Viner’s legacy — one built over 24 years of training star athletes, including Alina Kabaeva, Vladimir Putin’s longtime rumored romantic partner, whose influence in the sport has been resurging in recent years. In fact, it was likely a conflict between Viner and her former protégé that led to her departure. Meduza looks back at the career of a coach whose gymnasts won countless medals for Russia on the international stage — and whose coarse personality was as well-known as her competitive success.

‘She’s an angel compared to who she was back then’

Irina Viner was born in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, in 1948. She began doing rhythmic gymnastics at the age of 11 in Tashkent, graduated from the Uzbek State Institute of Physical Culture, and won the title of champion of the Soviet Republic three times. However, for a relative outsider, breaking into the USSR national team at that time was effectively impossible.

In 1972, Viner became the head coach of the Tashkent rhythmic gymnastics team and, later, the Uzbekistan team. In 1978, she met a talented nine-year-old gymnast named Venera Zaripova. Zaripova would later recall their first meeting:

Viner immediately saw immense potential in the flexible and talented Zaripova. By the age of 14, Zaripova had been accepted into the USSR national team, and Viner, previously a minor figure in the gymnastics world, became the mentor of a new rising national star. As Zaripova later recalled, however, her career came at an extraordinary cost.

Zaripova painted a similar picture of her former coach in 2023, telling journalists:

In 1981, Zaripova’s grueling training schedule paid off with a silver medal at the USSR Championships. However, despite her continued efforts, she never became an Olympic champion: her performance level declined significantly due to injuries. Moreover, the USSR’s boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Games — the first Olympics to feature rhythmic gymnastics as an official sport — further derailed her chances. By the late 1980s, Zaripova’s competitive career came to an end, and in 1990 she moved to Israel, where she became the coach of the national team.

Despite reportedly being urged multiple times to change coaches, Zaripova remained loyal to Viner to the very end — even in the face of the harsh training methods for which Viner would later be repeatedly criticized. Viner herself has admitted that she could “compare a girl one day to a beauty and the next to a monster.”

Wooed by a future oligarch

Irina Viner and future billionaire Alisher Usmanov first met in their teenage years, when both trained at the Sports Palace in Tashkent: Viner in gymnastics, and Usmanov in fencing. In 1971, Usmanov moved to Russia to study at the Moscow Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), while Viner continued working in Uzbekistan. According to Viner, they ran into each other by chance on a street in Moscow when she was there on a business trip.

“She thought I was a pompous asshole, but I turned out to be a crazy and charming young man, incredibly intellectually developed and very knowledgeable about the female essence. That’s why she couldn’t resist!” Usmanov later said. Viner also admitted that her future husband “won her over with his intellect, his broad outlook on life, and his knowledge of art, sports, literature, and politics.”

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After graduating from MGIMO in 1976, Usmanov returned to Tashkent, where both his business career and his relationship with Viner began developing rapidly. However, in 1980, he was sentenced to eight years in prison for complicity in fraud, bribery, and embezzlement of socialist property. During this time, Viner was coaching Venera Zaripova on the national team, but she never fell out of contact with her future husband. And despite Zaripova’s status as a national star, Viner’s coaching career was stalled by her association with a convict. She was even barred from attending training camps.

“She would come to the gates of Novogorsk [where the training center is still located], and the guards would threaten to call the police. I would go to the gate, and she would pass me instructions through the closed door,” Zaripova recalled.

Usmanov was released early in 1986 due to “sincere repentance” and “exemplary behavior” (14 years later, the oligarch was rehabilitated and the case was recognized as fabricated). Even while imprisoned, he sent Viner a scarf — a traditional Uzbek gesture symbolizing a marriage proposal. The couple married in 1992.

Viner’s breakthrough

In the 1980s, the head coach of the USSR national team — and Viner’s main rival — was Albina Deriugina. After 1991, Deriugina decided to remain in Ukraine, and with Russian rhythmic gymnastics in urgent need of a new leader, that role fell to Irina Viner.

Viner was granted unrestricted access to the Novogorsk training center near Moscow, where she went on to train several generations of gymnasts. Viner provided conditions that were unprecedented at the time: state-of-the-art training and recovery equipment, proper nutrition, and opportunities for international training camps. Every aspiring Russian rhythmic gymnast dreamed of training at Novogorsk.

In the 1990s, Viner’s top student was Yana Batyrshina, whom she’d brought from Tashkent. During her national team career, Batyrshina won five gold medals at world championships, one European championship title in 1997, and a silver medal at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. It was the first Olympic medal in the history of Russian rhythmic gymnastics — but Viner still considered silver a defeat.

Two years later, Batyrshina, not yet 20, retired from the sport. Viner later blamed her former student for prioritizing her health, saying: “She wanted to eat. She left without finishing the season, even though she had a brilliant program. All the coaches were upset with her because they also received bonuses for her victories and had counted on them.”

In interviews, Batyrshina later claimed that Viner would often tell her, “Without me, you are nothing” (a statement Viner has denied ever making). After Batyrshina’s silver in Atlanta, the gymnast alleged that her coach told her the medal was not her own achievement.

But by the late 1990s, Viner had already set her sights beyond Batyrshina. A new favorite pupil had emerged, likely the most important athlete in Viner’s entire career: Alina Kabaeva.

Enter Kabaeva

Kabaeva joined Viner’s training group at the age of 10 in Tashkent, where she was born and raised. She was introduced to Viner by Venus Zaripova, whose parents were friends with hers. As with Zaripova, Viner immediately recognized Kabaeva’s unique potential, even though she didn’t fit the traditional image of a perfect gymnast: she was more muscular than most. But thanks to her high flexibility, strong coordination, and relentless work ethic, Kabeva quickly became her coach’s most accomplished student.

In 2004, Kabaeva delivered Viner’s long-awaited Olympic victory, winning gold at the Athens Games. Over her career, she claimed nine world championship titles and 15 European championship golds, not to mention numerous silver and bronze medals. Several gymnastics elements have been named after Kabaeva — moves that she seemed uniquely capable of performing.

Kabaeva’s success made both her and her coach icons of the sport, not only in Russia but also worldwide. In 2001, Irina Viner was officially appointed head coach of the Russian national team, and in 2008, she became president of the All-Russian Federation of Rhythmic Gymnastics. She was reelected in 2016 and 2020 and officially stepped down only in 2024, after the federation merged with other similar sports organizations to form the Russian Gymnastics Federation.

Leading the federation came with heavy administrative responsibilities, though Viner preferred to focus on working directly with athletes. She had the freedom to invite any gymnast from across Russia to her training center in Novogorsk. Among them was Yulia Barsukova, who won gold at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, easing Viner’s disappointment over a slip-up by Kabaeva.

Kabaeva’s next major setback came in 2001 when she and fellow Viner trainee Irina Chashchina were suspended from competing for over a year after testing positive for a banned weight-loss drug. But by 2004, Kabaeva had reclaimed her status as a favorite — both in her coach’s eyes and with the Olympic judges — when she took gold in Athens. After that triumph, she hoped for another Olympic appearance in Beijing in 2008, but her final world championship victory in 2007 turned out to be her last. According to Kabaeva, a knee injury prevented her from continuing her career.

As Viner bid farewell to her most successful protégé, she described Kabaeva as “a person driven by mood and emotion” and as someone who struggled to push forward when lacking motivation:

By 2007, according to Viner, Kabaeva was “essentially focusing on her political career,” having become a State Duma deputy. Later, she chaired the board of directors of Putin ally Yuri Kovalchuk’s National Media Group and, in 2022, was sanctioned by Western governments due to her “close ties” with the Russian president.

After Kabaeva’s departure from the sport, Viner introduced the world to two more Olympic champions: Evgenia Kanaeva, who won gold twice, and Margarita Mamun, who claimed victory once.

Those would be the last major athletic triumphs of Viner’s career. The Tokyo Olympics, postponed from 2020 to 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, were supposed to bring her another victory. She sent the twin sisters Dina and Arina Averina, multiple world champions and favorites for Olympic gold, to Japan.

However, the all-around title went unexpectedly to Israel’s Linoy Ashram — ironically, a student of coach Ayelet Zussman, who had trained under Venus Zaripova, Viner’s first major star. Despite making a visible mistake in the final by dropping her ribbon, Ashram still edged out Dina Averina by a fraction of a point.

With Averina left in tears, Viner accused the judges and international federation of unfairly inflating Ashram’s scores — and was subsequently banned for “violating ethical rules.” The sanction barred her from attending international competitions and official events for the next two years. “So this is the kind of freedom of speech and democracy we have now — for someone who prepared a team that was undefeated across five Olympics,” Viner told TASS.

Against the backdrop of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, sanctions against Russia, and the exclusion of Russian athletes from major international competitions, Viner’s statements might seem like a blip on the radar, but they did irreversible damage to her reputation. And in February 2025, it became clear that she would never return to international sports at her former level.

Viner’s ‘monopoly’ collapses

The scandals surrounding Russia’s international competitions did not affect Viner’s standing in Russian sports. Instead, as journalists from BBC Russian Service have reported, her position weakened due to her deteriorating relationship with Kabaeva. In 2022, Kabaeva — Viner’s former student and one of the country’s most influential women — announced the launch of an international association of rhythmic gymnastics clubs called Heavenly Grace. A few months later, the association’s academy opened at the Putin-backed Sirius educational center in Sochi. There, Kabaeva essentially took on Viner’s role from Novogorsk — leading the project, recruiting talented children from across Russia’s regions, training them, and building up Heavenly Grace.

Kabaeva’s academy has virtually unlimited resources. It even established its own set of competition rules, personally devised by Kabaeva and registered with Russia’s Sports Ministry. At the BRICS Games in Kazan in the summer of 2024, the association essentially participated as an independent team, competing directly against national teams — including Russia’s, which was led by Viner.

This rivalry in Kazan led to a major scandal. Viner was outraged when the judges initially named Maria Borisova, a gymnast from Heavenly Grace, as the top performer over Viner’s own student, Lala Kramarenko. Before joining Kabaeva’s academy, Borisova had trained under Viner, but she claimed she felt far more comfortable with her new mentor, saying that Kabaeva’s less pressurized training approach suited her better. Viner, however, countered in an interview that Kabaeva also had demanding standards, adding, “When you constantly coddle a child, they stop understanding discipline.”

The tension escalated when Viner publicly criticized the chief judge of the Kazan Games, Aysel Gasanova, saying, “Just because Heavenly Grace invited you doesn’t mean you should cater to them.” According to a spectator interviewed by BBC News Russian, Viner allegedly shouted at Kabaeva from the stands, “To hell with your Maria!”

Although Gasanova later revised the scores and declared Kramarenko the winner, she also filed a complaint with Sports Minister Mikhail Degtyarev, alleging that judges affiliated with the Russian Rhythmic Gymnastics Federation (subject to Viner’s influence) had deliberately downplayed Borisova’s scores and inflated Kramarenko’s. Degtyarev sided with Heavily Grace and instructed Viner to review her colleagues’ behavior.

The Kazan scandal and the rumored feud with Kabaeva coincided with Viner’s harsh criticism of Russian athletes who chose to compete at the 2024 Paris Olympics under a neutral status. In March 2024, she infamously called them a “team of bums” — a stance even Putin seemed to disapprove of, remarking more diplomatically that “everyone knows which country they represent, flag or no flag.”

After the Kazan Games, Viner’s influence began rapidly unraveling. In October 2024, Putin had her removed from the Presidential Council for the Development of Physical Culture and Sport. Two months later, on Degtyarev’s orders, the Rhythmic Gymnastics Federation was absorbed into the broader Russian Gymnastics Federation — headed not by Viner but by Oleg Belozerov, the head of Russian Railways. Viner wasn’t even offered a seat on the new organization’s presidium.

On February 12, 2025, it was announced that Viner was stepping down as head coach of the Russian national team after 24 years. Her two top gymnasts, Lala Kramarenko and Anna Popova, are facing potentially career-ending injuries, while most of Russia’s remaining promising athletes now train under Kabaeva at Heavenly Grace.

The story of Lala Kramarenko represents a painful epilogue to Viner’s own legacy. The young gymnast missed her chance to compete in the Olympics twice — in some ways, due to her coach’s decisions. In 2021, Viner sent the more experienced Averina twins to the Tokyo Games, leaving Kramarenko behind. By the time of the 2024 Paris Olympics, Kramarenko had gained enough experience and performed complex routines at national competitions — but was again sidelined when Viner refused to send any of her athletes to compete under a neutral flag.

After winning the BRICS Games (while already competing with an injury), Kramarenko underwent a serious knee operation, and it remains uncertain whether she’ll make a full recovery. Viner blamed the surgeons, alleging they had mistakenly removed the healthy part of her meniscus. However, Kramarenko’s father, soccer player Dmitry Kramarenko, disputed this, stating that the family had no complaints about the doctors. A source from the Petrovsky Russian Scientific Center for Surgery told the Telegram channel Baza that both of Kramarenko’s menisci were damaged and that the surgery had proceeded as planned.

Viner later softened her tone, explaining that her harsh approach stemmed from emotion and love for her athletes. “I’ve been told that Lala’s injuries are very serious, but the doctors did everything they could,” she wrote on her Telegram channel.

The post-Viner era

From February 14 to 22, the most recent Russian Rhythmic Gymnastics Championship took place at the Irina Viner-Usmanova Gymnastics Palace in Moscow’s Luzhniki Olympics Complex — a venue built with funding from Alisher Usmanov, whom the former national team head coach divorced in 2022 after 30 years of marriage (she’s since dropped her ex-husband’s surname). The winner of the most prestigious event — the all-around competition — was 17-year-old Maria Borisova, a student of Alina Kabaeva. Irina Viner did not attend the competition.

During the awards ceremony, the new head coach of the Russian national team was announced: Tatyana Sergaeva. A native of Nizhny Novgorod, Sergaeva spent 17 years as the senior coach for Russia’s group exercises team — first with the junior squad and later with the main team. Under her leadership, the group team won Olympic gold in London in 2012 and Rio de Janeiro in 2016. However, shortly before the Tokyo 2021 Games, Sergaeva left the team. According to rumors circulating in gymnastics circles, the reason for her departure was a conflict with Irina Viner. In 2022, Sergaeva began working with Heavenly Grace — and by the BRICS Games in the summer of 2024, her team had already outperformed the Russian national team.

Welcoming Tatyana Sergaeva to her new role, Oleg Belozerov, president of the Russian Gymnastics Federation, explained the reasoning behind her appointment:

Meanwhile, Sports Minister Mikhail Degtyarev said that “her task will be to preserve the best traditions of the national school while adapting to new realities.”

Alina Kabaeva has not commented on Sergaeva’s appointment. However, the “Heavenly Grace” website features her statement on Irina Viner’s departure from the national team — a departure Kabaeva considers “the end of an entire era in rhythmic gymnastics.”