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Nikolai Andrianov, Gymnastics Icon, Dies at 58  

Nikolai Andrianov, the record-setting Russian gymnast who had won more Olympic medals than any other male athlete before the swimmer Michael Phelps passed him, died Monday in Vladimir, Russia. He was 58.

The International Gymnastics Federation in Lausanne, Switzerland, announced his death, citing a degenerative nerve disease that had robbed him of his ability to speak and to move his arms and legs.

Immensely powerful in the upper body and with a gift for leaping quickly off the floor, Andrianov was especially strong in the rings and floor exercises, but over three Summer Olympics --Munich in 1972, Montreal in 1976 and Moscow in 1980 -- his 15 medals, seven of them gold, included at least one in all four of the other gymnastic events as well: the vault, pommel horse, parallel bars and horizontal bar. . . .

Beyond his physical gifts and technical mastery, however, he was known for his courage and the kind of bravado attributed to fighter pilots and astronauts -- "the right stuff," in the writer Tom Wolfe's phrase. He pushed other gymnasts to match his feats -- attempting triple back flip dismounts from the rings, for example, when everyone else was doing doubles. He also enjoyed his cigarettes and vodka.

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