Raisa Gorokhovskaya

She was born in Moscow and between 1946 and 1949 studied at a circus school. In 1947 she was invited to train in a diving club and won the Moscow championships in the same year.^[1] While she had a strong base in acrobatics, it took her a year to learn swimming. Until then, a coach was helping her out of water with a pole after a jump.^[5]

In 1950 she married Leonid Zakharovich Gorokhovsky (Russian: Леонид Захарович Гороховский, b. 1925), a Navy officer who took her away to Saint Petersburg. They have two sons, born in 1952 and 1964. In 1953, her husband started studying the theory of diving and later became the first Soviet diving coach with a PhD in the subject. Between 1962 and 1969 he worked with the Uzbekistani diving team in Tashkent, and in 1969 moved to Moscow to coach the Soviet diving team.^[1]

After retirement from senior competitions in 1969 Gorokhovskaya worked for 40 years as a physiotherapists, at a Moscow boarding school for children with cerebral palsy.^[6] Her first son had the same disability, which motivated her to choose this profession.^[7]

Since 1992, she competed in the masters category and won 15 European and world titles in diving.^[1][7] Because of her small weight she always preferred a fixed diving platform to springboard. She also competed in masters swimming at the national level.^[4]