Elena Vyacheslavovna Mukhina (Russian: Елена Вячеславовна Мухина; first name sometimes rendered "Yelena", last name sometimes rendered "Muchina"; 1 June 1960 – 22 December 2006) was a Soviet gymnast who won the all-around title at the 1978 World Championships in Strasbourg, France. Her career was on the rise, and she was widely touted as the next great gymnastics star until 1979, when she broke a leg and missed several competitions. The rushed recovery from that injury, combined with pressure to master a dangerous and difficult tumbling move (the Thomas salto) caused her to break her neck two weeks before the opening of the 1980 Summer Olympics, leaving her permanently quadriplegic.

Elena Mukhina was born 1 June 1960, in Moscow. She was raised by her grandmother, Anna Ivanovna after being orphaned at a young age; according to different sources, she was either orphaned at age five, or her mother died when she was three and her father left the family.

Mukhina took an interest in gymnastics and figure skating at an early age. When an athletic scout visited her school, she eagerly volunteered to try out for gymnastics. She later joined the CSKA Moscow sports club and was eventually inducted into the CSKA Hall of Fame.

Through 1975, Mukhina was largely unnoticed as a gymnast. Then, two separate incidents brought her to the forefront for the Soviet team: Romanian domination of the Soviet gymnasts at the 1976 Olympics (for which the director for Soviet women's gymnastics, Larisa Latynina, was blamed; Latynina's response was, "it's not my fault that Nadia Comăneci was not born in the Soviet Union."), which increased pressure on Soviet gymnasts to return to winning competitions, and Mukhina's transition to working with men's coach Mikhail Klimenko [ru].

Klimenko had not worked with girls before, but Mukhina's previous coach, Alexander Eglit, encouraged him to take a look at her. Klimenko was impressed by her intelligence and coordination and began training her. In a 1978 profile, Mukhina described herself as someone who wanted to perform advanced acrobatics but was scared of them and often cried when Klimenko began teaching her new elements.

She participated in the 1975 Spartakiad and, after a poor landing, suffered a spinal injury that made her unable to turn her head. She was supposed to wear a cervical collar to recover, but Klimenko daily brought her from the hospital to the gym to train without it. Mukhina was reportedly afraid to disclose injuries to her coach and would hide them from him. She once dislocated her thumb and continued training through intense pain after repositioning it herself, and on another occasion, she won a competition after having received a concussion, stimulating herself with smelling salts.

Mukhina won the 1976 Soviet junior championships, though she did not qualify as a member of the Olympic team.

In 1977, at the 1977 European Championships, she won silver and the all-around and three event titles in the balance beam, uneven bars, and floor exercise finals, along with a bronze medal on vault. She also placed second at the Soviet championships. Later in the year, she competed at the USSR Cup. There she ruptured her Achilles tendon and continued competing against medical advice, and she won the all-around silver medal.