Her career was on the rise, and she was widely touted as the next great gymnastics star until 1979, when she broke a leg and missed several competitions.

The rushed recovery from that injury, combined with pressure to master a dangerous and difficult tumbling move (the Thomas salto) caused her to break her neck two weeks before the opening of the 1980 Summer Olympics, leaving her permanently quadriplegic.

In one of the most stunning all-around performances in history, she won the gold medal, beating Olympic Champions Nadia Comăneci and top-ranked Soviet gymnast Nellie Kim, among others.

She also tied for the gold medal in the floor exercise event final, as well as winning the silver in balance beam and uneven bars.

Yet, in spite of these innovations, Mukhina maintained the classic Soviet style, inspired by ballet movements and expressive lines.

A documentary film of the Soviet national team (1978) features Mukhina talking with her coach, Mikhail Klimenko, and footage of her rigorous training regimen.

[3] Mukhina's floor exercise tumbling passes were considered revolutionary at the time because they included a never-before seen combination salto (the "Muchina").

[4]In 1979, while training for the 1979 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships, Mukhina suffered a broken leg, which kept her out of the World Championships in Fort Worth, Texas, a competition in which the Soviet team suffered its first defeat at the hands of their arch-rivals from Romania, with only Nellie Kim and Stella Zakharova able to medal in apparatus and All-Around disciplines.

With less than a year until the 1980 Summer Olympics to be held in Moscow, the pressure was on the Soviet team coaches and doctors to get the previous All-Around champion Mukhina back on her feet and ready for the games.

In an interview with Ogonyok magazine, Mukhina blamed the doctors at TsITO (Central Institute of Traumatology and Orthopedics), who were serving the National Team for attempting to rush her back into training too soon, saying she begged them not to remove her cast and discharge her because "they're dragging me from home to workouts," and she knew she was not yet healed.

Once more against her wishes, the doctors removed her cast prematurely, and Mukhina returned to training for the Olympics while beginning a strenuous workout program at CSKA Moscow to lose the weight she had gained while laid up from surgery.

With lingering weakness in her leg, and mounting exhaustion from the grueling weight loss workouts, Mukhina had great difficulty coming back up to speed on what was to be the new end element of one of her floor exercise tumbling passes, the Thomas salto.

In one of her few interviews about the accident, published in Ogonyok magazine, she criticized the Soviet gymnastics program for deceiving the public about her injury, and for the system's insatiable desire for gold medals and championships: ...for our country, athletic successes and victories have always meant somewhat more than even simply the prestige of the nation.

[4]Despite this, Mukhina took some of the responsibility for not saying no to protect herself from further harm, and noted that her first thought as she lay on the floor with her neck severely broken was, "Thank God, I won't be going to the Olympics.

[2] After Mukhina's paralysis and several other close calls with other Olympic-eligible female gymnasts, the Thomas salto was removed from the Code of Points as an allowed skill for women.

Her injury was a featured topic in the 1991 A&E documentary More Than a Game; and her World Championship performance is captured in the ABC Sports video Gymnastics' Greatest Stars.