Vyacheslav Semyonovich Skomorokhov

Vyacheslav Semjonowitsch Skomorokhov ( Russian Вячеслав Семёнович Скоморохов , English transcription Vyacheslav Skomorokhov ; born October 4, 1940 in Starobilsk , then Ukrainian SSR ; † 1992 in Luhansk ) was a Soviet champion , who was a Soviet hurdler in 1969.

Career

He started his career in the 110-meter hurdles . In 1965 he was second and in 1966 third on this route in the Soviet championship. At the European Championships in Budapest in 1966 he reached the final and was seventh in 14.2 seconds. At the first European Indoor Games in Dortmund in 1966 , he finished fourth in 7.9 seconds.

After finishing fifth in the Soviet championship in the 400-meter hurdles in 1966 , he switched to the long track in 1968. From 1968 to 1971 he won four Soviet championship titles in a row, over the rarely run 200-meter hurdles he was Soviet champion in 1965 and 1969. At the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, he improved fourth in his semifinals to 49.61 seconds. In the final, he climbed to 49.12 seconds and finished fifth, one second behind the clear winner, David Hemery , and only a tenth of a second behind second-placed Gerhard Hennige .

After winning the Soviet Championship in 1969 in 49.1 seconds, Skomorokhov traveled to Athens as the favorite for the 1969 European Championships . After Hemery took on the hurdles sprint and Germany boycotted participation because of the Jürgen May affair , the 1968 Olympic bronze medalist John Sherwood was the only serious competitor. In the final, Skomorochow won in 49.7 seconds with four tenths of a second ahead of Sherwood. Two years later at the European Championships in Helsinki in 1971 Skomorochow reached the final again, but was only seventh in 50.8 seconds.

Skomorochow was 1.85 m tall and weighed 80 kg in his active time. He was almost deaf, he could barely hear the shot of the starter pistol. Five weeks before he won the title in 1969, he won the World Deaf Games in Belgrade with 14.3 seconds in the hurdles sprint and 51.4 seconds over the 400 meter hurdles. His European title in 1969 was the first major title won by a deaf athlete. Next to Skomorochow, the walker Gerhard Sperling was the only world-class deaf athlete.

Best times

• 110 m hurdles: 13.9 s, 1965
• 400 m hurdles: 49.12 s, 1968

literature

• ATFS (Ed.): USSR Athletics Statistics. London 1988
• Ekkehard zur Megede: The Modern Olympic Century 1896-1996 Track and Field Athletics. Berlin 1999 (published by the German Society for Athletics Documentation eV )

Web links

• Vyacheslav Semjonowitsch Skomorochow in the database of Sports-Reference (English; archived from the original )
• Short biography on sportbiography.ru (Russian)

Footnotes

1. ↑ Характер бойца ( Russian ) 2007. Retrieved March 30, 2011.
2. ↑ Record list of the deaf games
3. ↑ On page 157 of the ATFS publication there is the caption: "Vyacheslav Skomorokhov, the only deaf-mute athlete to have won a major title" (translation: "Skomorokhov, the only deaf-mute athlete who has won a major title") .