Born in
Baku, Azerbaijan SSR, and raised in Tbilisi, she became the youngest medallist at the
Soviet Athletics Championships in 1949, coming runner-up to
Yevgeniya Sechenova, the reigning 200 m European champion. Soon afterwards the teenager broke
Soviet records in the 200 m and then the long jump. She won her first national title in 1951. That same year she reached the podium at the
World Student Games, taking the long jump bronze medal behind fellow Soviet
Aleksandra Chudina and Hungary's
Olga Gyarmati. Khnykina trained at
Dynamo in Tbilisi. She competed for the Soviet Union in the
1952 Summer Olympics held in
Helsinki,
Finland in the 200 metres, where she won the bronze medal. She repeated this achievement four years later in
Melbourne at the
1956 Summer Olympics, only this time it was in the long jump. The
Journal of Olympic History listed her as having died in 1994, but this report was in error as the
Georgian Olympic Committee celebrated her 80th birthday in 2013. ==References==