Oksana Chusovitina is a gymnast who has competed for the Unified Team, Germany, and Uzbekistan.
She competed at every edition of the Summer Olympic Games between 1992 and 2020. She is the only gymnast and the fifth female Olympian to participate in eight consecutive editions, following Lesley Thompson, Josefa Idem, Nino Salukvadze, and Claudia Pechstein. She also joins her teammate Svetlana Boguinskaia as the only female gymnasts to represent three different banners at the Olympic Games. Spanning eight editions of her Olympic career, she won only two medals, a gold and a bronze.
Chusovitina started her Olympic career in 1992 as a member of the Unified Team in the women's artistic gymnastics. There, she and her teammates from the former Soviet republics shared their gold-medal triumph in the women's team all-around routine and placed seventh in the floor exercise final. She represented her native Uzbekistan in the next three editions of her career (1996 to 2004) but did not receive a single medal in any of her events contested. In 1997, she married two-time Olympic Greco-Roman wrestler Bakhodir Kurbanov and welcomed their son Alisher two years later.
When her son Alisher was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia in 2002, Chusovitina and her husband accepted an offer from the German gymnastics coaches to seek advanced medical treatment for their son. With the prize money earned from the gymnastics meets and the funds raised and donated by the members of the international gymnastics community, Chusovitina was able to secure treatment for Alisher at the University of Cologne hospital in Germany. While her son underwent leukemia treatment, she started competing with the German team as a gratitude for helping save her son's life and obtained a citizenship in 2006.
At her fifth Olympics in 2008, Chusovitina attained admirable results in her respective routines as a member of the German women's artistic gymnastics team. She placed ninth in the individual all-around final and ended her 16-year-old career medal drought with a silver behind the North Korean teen Hong Un-jong in the women's vault. She has continued to be a member of the German team for her remarkable sixth Olympic appearance four years later in London but left the Games again without a single medal, placing fifth on the vault. Contemplating on her retirement and coaching, Chusovitina switched back to competing for Uzbekistan in the succeeding Olympiads after London 2012 with a goal of winning an Olympic medal on her signature apparatus for her country. Ironically, she already claimed medals for the Unified Team and Germany but not for her home country.
Chusovitina returned to her seventh Olympics in 2016 and eighth in 2020 with a historic feat as the oldest and most experienced Olympic gymnast of all-time. Despite setting a new record, she failed to attain a single medal for her native country on the vault. She was also selected to carry the Uzbek flag during the Tokyo 2020 opening ceremony with Bobo-Usmon Baturov.