High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Yelena Victorovna Davydova (Russian: , born August 7, 1961 in Voronezh, 400 miles south of Moscow), is a Russian (formerly, Soviet) gymnast. She is the 1980 Olympic All-Around Champion. Davydova became interested in gymnastics at age six after seeing on television the famous Soviet Olympic gold medallists Larissa Petrik and Natalia Kuchinskaya. She attempted alone to be enrolled in Voronezh's famous Spartak Gymnastics school, yet was turned away, as she was very small, and considered at the time to have the wrong physique for the sport. Rather than giving up however, she secretly watched the lessons through windows and tried to imitate in the schoolyard what she had observed.