Yury Titov
USSR
Artistic Gymnastics
Overall Ranks
#18 among Gymnasts
#12 among Male Gymnasts
#9 among Soviet Olympians
#5 among Soviet Male Gymnasts
Olympic Results
1956
Individual All-Around - Bronze
Team - Gold
Vault - Bronze
Horizontal Bar - Silver
1960
Individual All-Around - Bronze
Team - Silver
Floor Exercise - Silver
1964
Team - Silver
Horizontal Bar - Silver
Total
Events - 24
Gold - 1
Silver - 5
Bronze - 3
Yury Yevlampiyevich Titov was born on November 27, 1935 on Omsk, USSR, and took up grymnastics at age 14. By the time he was 19 years old, he had been named to the Soviet national team, and his first major international competition was the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne.
That year, all of the gymnastic events were held at once, with each gymnast's score counting toward the individual event, the all-around, and the team event at the same time. Titov's best individual event was the horizontal bar, where he scored a 19.4, good enough for the silver medal, but 0.2 points behind Takashi Ono of Japan, who won the gold.
He won another individual medal in the vault, this one a bronze. He was only 0.1 points behind the gold medalists, so his overall score was still very good. He came in 5th place in two of the other individual events, and finished in the top 10 in all 6, which helped him earn the bronze medal in the individual all-around, though he was more than 0.4 points behind the other medalists, Ono and Viktor Chukarin, his Soviet teammate.
The team event was close. The USSR had won gold in 1952, and Chukarin had won his second straight all-around gold, and with Titov as a strong second scorer on the team, the Soviets were able to defeat the Japanese team by 1.85 points, earning a gold medal for the team. This would be the last time Japan lost the team event until 1980, when they didn't compete.
In 1960, the format had been updated so that the individual events had a final round after the team and all-around events had been completed. In the individual all-around, Titov finished third again, earning a repeat bronze, with Ono again taking the silver, and a new Soviet teammate, Boris Shakhlin, taking the gold.
In the team event, the 6 Japanese gymnasts all finished among the top 9 overall, making them very hard to beat. With Shakhlin and Titov's impressive individual scores, they were able to make it close, but the Soviets still lost by 2.5 points, but were 13.65 points ahead of Italy, who won bronze.
Titov qualified for all 6 event finals, but only managed to medal in one, the floor exercise. In that event, he qualified in second, and managed to hold on to it after the final performance, though the third place finisher closed the gap a little, but he still managed to take silver. He had qualified third in both the rings and the pommel horse, but poor final performances dropped him out of the medals in each, but it was still very impressive that he qualified for all 6 finals.
The format remained the same in 1964, when Titov returned for his third Olympics. By that time, he had been surpassed by several of his teammates, and finished 13th overall in the individual all-around, fifth among the Soviets, and a full point short of the medals. In the team event, there were still just two teams competing for gold, but the Soviets lost to Japan again by an identical 2.5 point margin to repeat as silver medalists.
Titov qualified for only one event final that year, the horizontal bar, where he had earned his first medal back in 1956. He qualified #2 behind Shakhlin, then scored a 9.8 in his final performance, which allowed him to hold onto his spot and earn another silver medal. He remained on the national team for two more years, then retired after the 1966 World Championships, with 9 Olympic medals to his name.
After competing in the Olympics 3 different times, Titov ended his career with only 1 gold medal, which came in the team event in 1956, but he won 5 silvers and 3 bronzes as well, and was in the top six 7 other times. While he was never the best in the world, or even in his own country, he was near the top so often and for so long, that he has earned a spot as one of the greatest Olympians of all time.
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