Oldest Olympic gymnast Oksana Chusovitina to miss Paris Olympics 2024 following injury at Asian Championships

The legendary artistic gymnast and one of the most senior Olympians ever, Oksana Chusovitina, is set to miss her ninth Summer Games. She had to withdraw from the Paris Olympics 2024 after an injury sustained during the Asian Championships recently.

The 48-year-old gymnast's Olympic campaign began during the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, where she claimed the team all-around gold, and there has been no looking back for Chusovitina ever since.

She participated in every quadrennial event consecutively until the 2020 Tokyo Games and joined the likes of Ian Miller (10) and Nino Salukvadze (9) with the most Olympic appearances.

In her eight participations, she has also claimed a silver medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympics in the horse vault event. She was also entitled to the honorary sports teacher award from the president of Uzbekistan in 2021 following her Tokyo Olympics appearance.

However, Oksana Chusovitina's streak will come to an end now as she got injured during the podium training for the Asian Gymnastics Championships in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and had to withdraw from the Paris Olympics.

Gymnastics Now posted the update on their X handle (formerly Twitter) on Thursday (May 23) and wrote:

"Oksana Chusovitina announced this morning that her bid for a ninth Olympic Games at the age of 48 has come to an end after she was injured during podium training at the Asian Championships. She was planning to do all-around in a final effort to qualify to #Paris2024."

Oksana Chusovitina confirmed the news through an Instagram post addressing her fans and the gymnastics community.

When Oksana Chusovitina denied retiring until she won a medal in front of the home crowd

Gymnastics - Artistic - Olympics: Day 2

Oksana Chusovitina has competed for two nations (Germany and Uzbekistan) and the Unified Team in her brief Olympic career. She won the gold with the Unified Team and the silver with the German Team, and she had yet to win a medal with the Uzbek side, for whom she had competed in the last two Summer Games.

Expressing her desire to win a medal at the 2022 Asian Games for Uzbekistan, Chusovitina stated (via Olympics.com):

"I want to tell everyone that I have decided to prepare for the Asian Games 2022. I just can't finish my career without a medal for Uzbekistan."

There were rumors after her 2020 Tokyo Olympics campaign that Chusovitina's career was over and she would be retiring, but the gymnast refuted such claims.