SAN DIEGO — Viktor Bryzhin and Olga Vladykina won Olympic track gold medals for the Soviet Union at the 1988 Summer Games in Seoul, South Korea. Bryzhin was on the 4x100-meter relay team. Vladykina won the individual 400 meters and got the baton in the anchor leg of the 4x400 at roughly the same time as American legend Florence Griffith-Joyner, then pulled away from her with one of the fastest relay legs ever recorded (47.7 seconds) to help set a new world record.
They were from what was then called Voroshilovgrad, a city of 400,000 named for a Soviet military commander. After the wall fell and the Soviet Union dissolved, it reverted to its original name of Luhansk in the far east of Ukraine along the Russian border.
They got married and had two daughters who also run track. Like all kids in the region, Anastasiia Bryzhina and her older sister grew up speaking Russian before learning Ukrainian and English in high school. But Anastasiia, without a shadow of a doubt, wants to make her allegiances clear.
