It is September 2020. Twenty years have passed since that event. I enter the gym of the Olympic Sports Center, where you can meet Vihrov on weekdays almost all day long. He is now a gymnastics coach. The hall has been open for fifteen years, the inventory is not the latest, but the conditions cannot be compared to those in which the Olympic gold was minted by a Rigan. At that time, the athletes had only only the hall of the Riga Gymnastics School on Miera Street, moreover, its equipment was not complete. “The mat was in poor condition and it wasn’t always possible to train on it. The same could be said about other gear. It was a different time,” the Olympic champion recalls. It was fortunate that Vihrov’s coach Alexander Patrushev, whom the former gymnast still talks about his success, found a job in Germany and later in Switzerland in the second half of the 1990s. Gymnasts had the opportunity to go to training camps and participate in Bundesliga competitions. Still, it’s hard to imagine the Olympic champion growing up in such conditions. “A lot was determined by willpower. In the process of training, I gave everything I could because I really wanted to,” Vihrov admits.
The road to Sydney’s gold was not easy for Igor. First, his debut at the Olympics may not have happened. At the 1999 World Championships, which was a qualifying competition for the Olympics, Vihrov won Latvia’s only ticket to Sydney in a multi-combat qualification. However, he did not stand out with a high result in the finals of the multi-fight, nor in certain disciplines (he was the ninth in the free movement qualification), while his training partner Yevgeny Sapronenko won a silver medal in the support jump. “When I returned home from the championship, I was told that the road sign would be for Eugene. It was in the interest of the federation to delegate who has the best chance of winning the medal,” Vihrov recalls. However, it was decided to go the middle way and build on the results of the 2000 European Championships. Igor started convincingly, winning the sixth place in the multiplayer to a split third place in the free movement element. The then competitor, Sapronenko, had no reason to be offended, and he awaited his star hour four years later in Athens, becoming Olympic vice-champion in the leap of support.
Vihrov came to the Sydney Games practically alone, as coach Patrushev worked with the Swiss national team. “I felt a lot of pressure. It was hard during the training – almost nothing was achieved.
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