Life and Career
Serebrianska was born in Simferopol, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union. She started gymnastics in 1982 at age 4, with her mother Liubov as her coach at the Gratsia club in Simferopol. She later moved to the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, to train at the Deriugins School.
Serebrianska tied Bulgaria's Maria Petrova for the all-round title at the 1995 World Championships in Vienna, Austria. She also won several individual apparatus titles: rope at the 1993 World Championships in Alicante, Spain; hoop (tied with Belarusian Larissa Lukyanenko and Bulgarian Maria Petrova), ball (tied with Ukrainian teammate Olena Vitrychenko), clubs and ribbon in the 1994 World Championships in Paris, France; ball (tied with Russians Yanina Batyrchina and Amina Zaripova) at the 1995 Worlds in Vienna, Austria; and again in 1996 in Hungary. She also won the 1996 European all-round title, together with the team gold, and gold on rope, ball and ribbon finals.
At the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, Serebrianska's technical strength won her the gold medal, although she had a slight fumble with the ribbon before her final toss. She was ahead of her closest rival, Russia's Yanina Batyrchina by 0.150 points going into the ribbon routine, who competed before her and dropped the ribbon.
Serebrianska, Kabayeva, Olexandra Tymoshenko and Yevgeniya Kanayeva are the only rhythmic gymnast to win World, European and Olympic titles.
At the 1997 European Championships in Greece, Serebrianska dropped a club at the end of her all-round clubs routine (9.825), but scores of 9.950 on both the rope and ribbon, and a 9.912 on hoop gave her an accumulated score of 29.637 and hence the bronze medal by 0.012 ahead of French competitor, Eva Serrano. In the apparatus finals, she won the gold in the rope event with a perfect 10.000, and took silver in the clubs and ribbon events. She did not compete at the 1997 World Championships due to an illness suffered by her mother. In her final major competition, the 1998 European Championships, she reached each of the apparatus final events. She won gold in the hoop final (9.950) and silver in rope (9.933). She also won bronze in the ribbon event (9.933), tying with the same score as Evgenia Pavlina of Belarus and Yanina Batyrchina of Russia, but winning the medal due to the new tie-breaker scoring system. She placed 6th (lost in the tie-breaker to Belarusian, Yulia Raskina) in the all-round final.
Serebrianska retired from rhythmic gymnastics in 1998. She is 178 cm / 5.8 ft in height.
Read more about this topic: Kateryna Serebrianska
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