Gina
Torrealva (PER) |
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| This is the last article that I have to write. I just finished more than twenty individual pages for a whole group of international players but I wanted to save this one for last because it holds something very special that the readers might find interesting. And I hope that Gina also reads this soon, because it concerns her more than anybody else... | |
| I interviewed Gina the day after the penultimate Christmas of the Twentieth Century, on the baseball bleachers of the sports complex where the Peruvian National Volleyball Team trains every day. My initial plan was to interview the coach, Man Bok Park, but something told me that the Korean wouldn't even give me the time of day, so I decided to talk to Gina (then his assistant) first. I explained to her what I'm doing in this web page, and she said to try and sell my idea to "Mr Park", but that most likely he wouldn't even look at me. That's precisely what happened. Gina then offered to give me the interview instead of him, so we sat down on the bleachers on a sunny Sunday morning and had a talk that I will never forget. Gina is a very humble person, and she was very polite and soft-spoken as I asked her about all those empty spaces in my knowledge of the history of the Peruvian Volleyball Programme. She helped me as much as her own knowledge was able to—nothing before Mr Park and nothing after Seoul '88 (because she retired soon after that and didn't keep up with the team's events). |  Gina celebrating a point over the USA at the final match of the '87 Japan Cup. Right after the match, Gina was named the tournament's MVP, a proof of her all-around consistence, her leadership abilities, and her maturity. (...and her modesty, I might add. In the interview, she carefully avoided mentioning this recognition that she was given!) |
| She told me
how when she was in the Youth National Team, Mr Park saw how talented and
united her generation was, and how he brought some of them up to play with
the Adult Team in order to get them used to a stronger technical level.
Thanks to this, these young girls gained valuable experience and elevated
their own levels so much, that when they went down to play at the Junior
level they performed extremely well. The best proof of this was the second
place at the '81 Junior World's in Mexico. With such a good result, these
players knew that they had it in them to do great things in the future.
Once they were integrated to the Adult Team and with the contributions of
several more experienced players (Aurora Heredia, Silvia León, and
Cecilia del Risco), the team began to perform really well. But the basis
of the team that came in second at the '82 Adult World's in Peru was
formed mainly by the Juniors: Cecilia
Tait, Raquel Chumpitaz, Denisse
Fajardo, and Gina Torrealva. The success of these players
was passed on to the next generation of starters, which included Rosa
García, Natalia
Málaga, and Gaby
Pérez del Solar. Together, these two generations lasted
from roughly around Los Angeles '84 to Seoul '88.
Gina and I talked about various things, like how Mr Park would force them to think on the court, or the things that he would say to them during time-outs to make them react (sometimes not very positive things). She also told me the things she would do as the team captain to make her players get along, or at least to resolve any conflicts they had on their own. (All of these things are scattered throughout this website; I won't explain each one in their entirety.) She told me about the '86 World's, the '87 Japan Cup (in which she was named the tournament MVP, but how humble was she that she didn't even mention it!), but when we got to Seoul there was a slight pause, as if I were about to open a Pandora's box that she had preferred to keep closed all these years. |
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 Gina blocks a Bulgarian along with fellow teammate Raquel Chumpitaz at the '82 World's in Peru. Lucky her to have lived that wonderful episode in Peruvian sports history! [Photo: Bruce Hazelton, Volleyball Monthly] |
It's painful to remember this chapter, and the Peruvian public certainly felt Gina's pain on that fateful dawn of the 29th of September, 1988. But Gina showed a heartfelt excitement when talking about the victories over China and Japan. Those matches at least, brought a smile to her face. When I asked her what she was praying for after scoring point 15 over China's 14 in the fifth, she replied that she has an enormous faith in god, and that all she had asked for was "one more little point". That point came, sent from heaven, and according to Gina, it brought down a whole dynasty, because after that China crumbled and lost its air of invincibility. The match against the USA was interesting. She said that suddenly she looked at the scoreboard and it read USA 2 : PER 0 and she began telling her teammates, "Come on, we have to do something!" |
| The victory
over the USAmericans assured them of the first place in their pool
(actually, only one set was necessary for that), but during the beginning
of the match things were looking really dark for the Peruvians. If they
hadn't come in first, they would've had to face the USSR in the semifinal,
but fortunately that wasn't the case, and instead they faced Japan. Gina
laughed again when I asked her how the team reacted to Ichiko
Satoh knocking her coach down with bench and all after
trying to put a ball back in play. She said that everyone found it funny,
and that the match (which had been unusually easy) didn't seem like a
challenging Olympic semifinal to her. But the comic relief of that little
incident made the Peruvians lose their concentration, because when they
started the third set they were all flat on their feet! Japan steamrolled
their way to, and seemed to take control of the fifth set, but then the
Peruvians ended their run at 13. For Gina, this semifinal victory on the
27th of September that assured her of the silver medal must have been one
of the happiest moments of her life (I imagine, I forgot to ask her).
However, to talk about how destiny unraveled itself and didn't let her take home the medal that she wanted... that was difficult to even get it out in the open. Gina barely looked at me when I mentioned the words "Soviet Union", as she sat there looking downwards and shaking her head from side to side in disbelief. She admitted that she has the match taped, but every time she tries to see it her heart races and she immediately turns the VCR off. "How long has it taken you to recover from this loss?" I asked. She looked at me, and will all the honesty in her heart she replied, "Never. I still haven't gotten past that." But why, one might ask. Because Gina feels that she lost the last ball of the match, the ball that gave the Soviets the gold. "The ball was tight, and I tried to do everything I could to keep the ball in play but the Russian [Tatyana Sidorenko] was already there," she recalled. But her teammates told her after the match that it wasn't her fault, because it was a difficult ball to save. However, Gina feels that it was in her hands to steer things her way, but that unfortunately it wasn't meant to be. (At that point I wanted to go off on the following tangent but I just didn't find the right opening to embark on it, so Gina, if you read this, here is a part of our conversation that you didn't hear.) |
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Call me a bit brash, but if you didn't know that a number of Peruvians felt that defeat deeply in their hearts, well now you do. I was one of them, but my manner of dealing with it consisted of two very odd steps. One of them I am about to complete today, 29 of August of 2000, because as soon as I finish this article I am e-mailing the URL of this website to many world wide sites interested in volleyball. (That's why most of the pages are in English, so the Latin American readers will have to excuse me until I have time to translate them all.) With this website, I have managed to make the story of the Peruvian National Team accessible to everyone in the world to read. By using the internet, I am making sure that this story doesn't get lost in oblivion with the going century. |
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| The other way
that I got over the Seoul defeat was even more cumbersome. I always had an
interest in political-historical events, and the year after Seoul there
were signs that the Soviet Bloc was beginning to crack. My interest for
the independence movements of the countries of Eastern Europe grew, and
after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the USSR—the
force behind the communist empire—ceased
to be in 1991. After the defeat in Seoul I had asked myself (back then I
was quite religious), Why did god let the Soviets win the gold? The
Soviet people didn't need a victory like that so much as the Peruvians
did, a people fraught with economic and social despair, burdened by
corruption, blackouts, terrorism, and inflation in quasi-Fourth World
conditions. Why didn't god give Peruvians that much deserved joy of
feeling good about themselves by winning the maximum honour in sports? It
was then, and with the events unfolding in Eastern Europe, that I decided
to get to "know" the Soviet Union, but not through
encyclopaedias from afar, but from within. Even more fantastic was
my determination to meet Valentina
Ogienko herself, and see with my own eyes if she was that
evil, cold-blooded, superhuman robot that stole the gold away from us.
(What a sore loser I was, you might say, and I admit it, totally. It was
something I felt I needed to do, a question I had to answer myself, and
the path I took to figure all this out has made my life so interesting
that I couldn't even begin to describe it.)
When I went to study in the USA, I heard about a Russian Language intensive programme that included a semester abroad in Saint Petersburg. I signed up immediately, studied the language, and on the 17 of July, 1993, I arrived on former Soviet ground. Living there wasn't easy, I have to say. Conditions don't exactly keep you on a positive note. Russians (and other former Soviet nations) have suffered a lot through the ages, if not under the Czars, then under Communism, or as history unfolds itself today, under the violent chaos that has taken over Russia. The people I met and talked to seemed to be cold and distant at first, but that's just a façade. Once they open up, they make sure to tell you where they're coming from, what the general feeling of people are towards the past and present, but they rarely tell you what they expect from the future, I don't know why. There are various events that have shaped their history, and it seemed that with the rigid, centralised system of government that existed before, every decision taken in Moscow directly affected more than two-hundred million Soviet citizens. They lived for a long time depending on decisions taken in their behalf, and that created a state of lethargy that can still be sensed today. This apathy is so noticeable (and understandable) that it is no wonder that the former Soviet peoples are learning still how to take individual matters into their own hands. In the meantime, mafias, corrupt politicians, and the filthy rich have made the post-USSR their playing ground. |
|
 Gina, in her earlier years. |
When I realised this, I began to miss certain things about Peru that I hadn't really perceived before. In contrast to life in the former Soviet Union, I longed to return to Peru and see all these things for myself again. For example, despite widespread poverty, Peruvians never stop enjoying life. The streets are full of people, throwing buckets of water in the hot summer days, strolling by the parks, listening to those ubiquitous salsa radio channels, climbing on informal public transportation that takes them to work, to school, or back to their homes. There is in Peru an energy that I didn't see in Russia, and I assume, that I would've found less of in the USSR of 1988. In the Soviet Union people couldn't do anything with respect to their economic situations, because after all, everyone was supposed to be equal, so who was considered poor? What they could improve were their intellectual conditions, that's why so many ordinary Russians are so cultured and well-read (just as long as it wasn't used to think too much or else the state would've shut them up). In Peru, on the other hand, education lacked but people at least strived to always be doing |
| something
to improve their economic conditions, whether shine shoes, drive buses,
deliver milk bottles, sell food on the street—anything.
In Peru, the hope that tomorrow will be a better day is a matter directly
in their hands. And in the meantime, Peruvians have a zest for [an
imperfect] life that I didn't see in Russians (let's hope that for their
benefit it changes in the future).
So what does all of this have to do with volleyball? When I arrived in Russia, I immediately began to search for clues that would take me to meet Valentina Ogienko. I asked people, "Do you remember that awesome middle hitter that won the gold in Seoul '88? Her name was Valentina Ogienko." People just looked at me with blank stares and replied, "Who?" I couldn't believe that nobody knew her! Didn't anybody see the gold-medal match? "Look", they would say, "the Soviet Union has had so many Olympic champions that we stopped counting a long time ago. We're more interested in ice hockey, figure skating, track and field, swimming, and sometimes football." I bought the local sports journal, Sport Ekspress, and it was true: volleyball articles accounted for mere paragraphs, while football and hockey took pages and pages. When I met the owner of a local swimming club, I asked if being in the field of sports, he knew where the volleyball club Avtomobilist Peterburg trained, maybe they could give me a clue. He didn't know. Eventually I gave up, because it seemed like volleyball was a foreign concept in the former USSR. The following year, I had to return to Russia for diverse reasons, and I found myself with the coincidence that the third Goodwill Games were about to begin in Saint Petersburg. I bought as many tickets to the volleyball matches as I could and I showed up at the Zimny Dvorets (Winter Palace), excited to see eight of the world's women's teams. I found a group of Peruvians along with a Colombian girl (the loudest one of them all) with a flag, so we all joined together and cheered Peru "in our way, with our own style", by waving and yelling and cheering and banging and clapping while the Russians around us found us extremely annoying. The coliseum wasn't full, but I figured as much because the tickets were expensive for Russian standards. That day we cheered a pathetic Peruvian team to a five set victory over the Cuban Junior squad, but still, we were proud of the Peruvians' achievement. We even came out on Peruvian TV, and the commentator called us "a tone-deaf bunch" that he couldn't imagine how the hell we had gotten there. (If he only knew...) |
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| In between matches, I took the time to walk around to see how the teams stretched, warmed up, or just sat in groups, hanging out. I wandered about looking for autographs, and the first player I had the fortune of meeting was Japan's fabulous Motoko Ohbayashi (who ended up not speaking a whisk of English). I also met the USAmericans Kim Oden, Danielle Scott (who is in top shape nowadays with the National Team), and Yoko Zetterlund, as well as the new Peruvians Milagros Moy (she's a born lefty, but she hits with her right), Sara Joya, and Iris Falcón, and of course the eternals, Rosa and Natalia. It was then that I spotted the Russians on the bleachers. I went over and struck conversation with the tall Yevgeniya Artamonova, who is one of the best outside hitters in the world nowadays, and who has a very sweet personality that makes you wonder where she gets her on-court ferocity! I also said hello briefly to Yelena Batukhtina, and to the fearsome Marina Nikulina (who doesn't come across as that in real life). And then, finally, after so much waiting, I met Valentina Ogienko. And you know what? She was a total darling! Very polite, not a machine, not a robot like she had seemed to me in 1988. We chatted in Russian for a bit, and when I told her I was Peruvian she smiled, as if evoking that historic match, and maybe she was very happy that someone from so far away had shown such enthusiasm when meeting her. She cordially gave me |
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| her autograph
and then with a very soft voice she excused herself. I couldn't believe I
had just spoken to THE Valentina Ogienko. If only Irina
Parkhomchuk had been around, but she had defected to Croatia
sometime in late 1990.
So what impression did I have of Valetina? A very positive one, I must say. She exuded modesty, which seemed so odd given her résumé in the sport. But judging by the public present at the coliseum, it didn't surprise me that the name Ogienko wasn't immediately recognisable to most of them. She had been one of many Soviet athletes who fulfilled their purpose of bringing gold medals to the USSR. But Gina, tell me, do you think that hundreds of people received them at the airport with flowers after their victory in Seoul? Do you think that the transit authorities in Moscow closed off streets to let the parade of victorious gold medallist volleyball players enter a jam-packed STADIUM awaiting them with thousands of people expressing their solidarity and their thanks for what they had done for their country? Do you think such massive displays of admiration took place? You have been to the USSR (back when it was), and I'm sure that you were kept indoors all the time, without going out to meet the people. I'm sure that there were celebrations before or after the sports events you attended, but that was all set up by the state to add a festive atmosphere to the competition. But the reality of the matter, in simple words comes down to this: in Peru, you have become a national hero, an idol, a role model; the Soviet players, however, just did their job and resumed their lives with much less recognition for their efforts than you have received from your own people. Yes, the ex-Soviets might have a gold medal stashed somewhere in their drawers, but you have a silver medal that earned you the respect, love, and admiration of your entire country. That is why I have written all of this, so that you don't feel guilty of a defeat that in reality was more of a victory than anything else. Remember, things happen for a reason, and it is time you let go of those ghosts from Seoul once and for all. It took me a long voyage, but once I answered my own question I continued my life with much more inner peace. I hope you may do the same, or at least, that this article helps you do so. This was the part of the conversation that we never had, and clearly I would've loved to tell it to you personally and see the reaction on your face. Of course it's never late to meet again and chat and share and remember and laugh, just like we did on that sunny morning in December...
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