Valentina Gerasimova (born May 15, 1948 in Quaraghandy, Quaraghandy Province,

Kazakhstan Kazakhstan, officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country located mainly in Central Asia and partly in Eastern Europe. It borders Russia to the north and west, China to the east, Kyrgyzstan to the southeast, Uzbeki ...

) was a

Soviet The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nation ...

era

track and field Track and field is a sport that includes athletic contests based on running, jumping, and throwing skills. The name is derived from where the sport takes place, a running track and a grass field for the throwing and some of the jumping eve ...

athlete specializing in middle distances. She competed in the 1976 Olympics. She entered the event as the

world record holder In its most general sense, the term "world" refers to the totality of entities, to the whole of reality or to everything that is. The nature of the world has been conceptualized differently in different fields. Some conceptions see the worl ...

, having run a 1:56.0 in Kiev just a month earlier in qualifying for the Olympics (though the mark had not yet been ratified as the world record, which it was after the Olympics). That time was a second and a half improvement on the previous record set by Bulgarian Svetla Zlateva and proved to be her personal best in the event. In the Montreal Olympics, she qualified for the semi-finals but was unable to make the final with a sub-par performance, as 6 of the qualifiers ahead of her bettered the standing Olympic record. In the final, teammate

Tatyana Kazankina Tatyana Vasilyevna Kazankina (russian: Татья́на Васи́льевна Каза́нкина; born 17 December 1951 in Petrovsk, Saratov Oblast, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union) is a Soviet/Russian former runner who set ...

took Gerasimova's world record, improving an additional second plus to 1:54.94.

References

1948 births Living people Athletes (track and field) at the 1976 Summer Olympics World record setters in athletics (track and field) Olympic athletes of the Soviet Union Sportspeople from Karaganda Soviet female middle-distance runners {{USSR-athletics-bio-stub