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. When doctors removed her cast against her wishes and had her try walking on the leg, she said that she knew she was walking "crookedly", and that something was not right. The TsITO doctors X-rayed the leg, and discovered that the fracture had not healed properly. Mukhina was rushed into surgery that afternoon, but the damage had already been done to her reputation; one of the National Team coaches, she said in the Ogonyok interview, showed up at her bed the day after surgery, and outright stated that she "wasn't conscientious", and that she could still "train in a cast". 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. Despite Mukhina's warnings that the element was constantly causing minor injuries, and was dangerous enough to potentially cause major injuries, she was pushed to keep the element in her floor routine, and she continued to practice it, even knowing it was a dangerous element. On 3 July 1980, two weeks before the Moscow Olympics, Mukhina was practising the pass containing the Thomas salto when she under-rotated the salto, and crash-landed on her chin, snapping her spine and leaving her quadriplegic. Mukhina was training at the Minsk Palace of Sport when the injury occurred; her coach Klimenko was not present. The Soviet Union awarded her Order of the Badge of Honour in 1980 in response to her injury, and then in 1982 or 1983, Juan Samaranch, the IOC President, awarded her the Silver Medal of the Olympic Order. Following the injury, the Soviet Gymnastics Federation remained secretive about the events surrounding Mukhina's injury, with Soviet team coach Yuri Titov deflecting inquiries about whether she would be trying for a comeback in 1984, even blaming Mukhina's "injury" on attempting a skill that