Veteran Oksana still blowing kisses

Uzbekistan’s 43-year-old gymnast Oksana Chusovitina blew kisses to the crowd as she began her Asian Games campaign on Tuesday — and angrily dismissed suggestions this could be her last tournament.

The oldest female gymnast in the competition by far, Chusovitina was greeted by whoops and shrieks from a near-capacity crowd on the first day of the women’s competition.

But the atmosphere took a minor tumble as the gymnasts filed past journalists at the end of the session — and Chusovitina was asked whether this would be her last hurrah.

“No! I want to go to Tokyo,” she angrily replied, referring to the upcoming Olympics in 2020.

Chusovitina, whose first Olympics was in 1992 in Barcelona, became the first gymnast to compete in seven Summer Games when she appeared at Rio 2016.

She appears determined to make it eight.

“It’s my dream to go to Tokyo,” she told AFP, adding that she still has fun on the gymnastics floor.

Chusovitina is aiming to reach the finals of both the vault and the balance beam.

The clear crowd favorite during the qualification round on opening day of the competition, Chusovitina — who first competed in 1987 — spun into a seemingly perfect first vault to cheers and applause.

By the end of her second and final flip across the apparatus, her noisy followers reached fever pitch as she blew a stream of kisses into the crowd.

Despite her extensive fanbase, Chusovitina said she had no family members watching in the crowd, although her 18-year-old son Alisha is following the competition at home in Germany and calls her every day.

The boy is older than many of his mother’s rivals at the Asiad.

Chusovitina’s extraordinary career saw her first competing for the Soviet Union in the 1980s, before she went to the Barcelona Games for the Confederation of Independent States — a unified team of former Soviet states — where she won gold.

By the time the 2008 Olympics came around in Beijing, she had switched to Germany after moving there to get treatment for Alisha, who was dealing with leukemia.