Nureyev versus today’s dancer

RUDOLF) Nureyev’s got a calcium spur on his right heel that cuts into his flesh regularly enough to make a lesser dancer quit immediately, but Nureyev, who is not Russian but Tartar, makes a joke of it – christening the wound ‘my omelet’; his remedy is a complicated bandage he calls a ‘sandwich’, which, when successful, makes a kind of cavity between flesh and bone.” (New York Times, 1981)

Rudolf Nureyev was tough. We all know the story: born a Tartar to a military father, he came to formal training late at seventeen. Under the tutelage of Alexander Pushkin, he then, he was different and exceptional: one of the greatest dancers.