When the melon seller stabbed the swimmer … and other tales from Moscow. David Hearst and Steven Downes report
DYNAMO Stadium, once the impregnable fortress of teams representing the Soviet Union’s Ministry of the Interior, is today under siege from a multitude of vendors’ stalls. The Metro stop, done up like a Roman temple, still bears a neo-classical frieze of discus throwers, but this Stalinist frill is receding rapidly from sight as the Barbarians swarm all over the ruins of the empire. This is what the Colosseum must have looked like after Rome fell to the Visigoths.
Many top Russian sportsmen are only too pleased to say “goodbye to all that”. The dollars they earn go into their pockets rather than those of the party. They can chose their own trainers and managers. The problem is what is happening around them. This week Alexandr Popov became the latest Russian sports star to move abroad, perhaps permanently. Popov won two swimming gold medals at the Barcelona Olympics four years ago, and repeated the feat in Atlanta this summer.
“Before Barcelona, I made no money,” he said last weekend as he sipped champagne at a Unesco reception in Paris. “After, I made some money. It’s my money, I spend it any way I feel like it: I can spend it on the girls, on cars, on houses.” But no amount of money could protect him from a moment of madness after a party in Moscow just weeks after his return from the Atlanta Games. Even now, nearly three months on from the attack that nearly ended his life, let alone his swimming career, Popov can only refer to it as “my accident”.
Popov and some friends had stopped to buy some watermelon from an Azeri street vendor. An argument developed, fists flew and suddenly one of the traders drew a knife on the Olympic champion. The six-inch blade narrowly missed a lung but badly damaged a kidney and punctured Popov’s diaphragm. The swimmer was in intensive care for 10 days.
“I don’t like to talk about it,” Popov says. “It was just a mistake. A stupid mistake of a friend of mine.” Popov’s success was due to the fact that, more than any other swimmer, he had managed to master the intense pain in every limb caused by oxygen debt at the end of a race. But even he had never before felt pain as he did on that dark night in Moscow.
Although he has been given a clean bill of health by his doctors, he will not know until his next race whether he will ever again be able to challenge his own world record. “I don’t think I’ll be ready for competition for another four or five months. It’s because of the injury. I need to see what’s happened in there.” To find out, he is returning to Canberra, Australia, where he has trained before. Popov says the move has nothing to do with the attack, nor the fears he has voiced in the past about living in Russia. But as he is soon to take out dual citizenship, a permanent move is not out of the question.
The stabbing was just another lawless incident in an increasingly violent post- communist society, where Moscow and St Petersburg are seen as modern-day frontier towns and where the rich – including professional sportsmen and women – are targets for criminals.
Two weeks ago Natalya Lepsehin, the wife of the Russian tennis team’s coach, and a friend found three men waiting at the lift outside her apartment. Anatoli, her husband, was abroad in Paris. The men forced the women to open the door, tied them up, and carefully went around inspecting the contents, bundling up the valuables as if they were working for a removal firm. By the time the women managed to free themselves and call the police, the robbers were long gone.
Incidents like these make Russian sportsmen and women think long and hard about where their loyalties lie. Irina Privalova, the European 100 and 200m champion, still lives in Moscow but these days prefers to use an uncomfortable but anonymous old Lada rather than the elegant Mercedes Benz saloon that is parked, unused, in a garage outside her home.
The last time she was seen out in her Merc, she was stopped at gunpoint. The gunman had seen a newspaper article that estimated her earnings at $500 000 and demanded a share before allowing her to go on her way. Privalova did not dare call for help: the extortionist was a policeman.
“It is dangerous for me in Moscow,” she says, “because if someone wants my money, they will take it.” While Privalova’s shakedown at gunpoint was for no more than $100, it left her shaken. She so fears being targeted by the Moscow mafia that now whenever she leaves the country, she pays for round-the-clock protection for her seven-year-old son.
Some sportsmen become hoods themselves. Few tears were shed among the local Chelyabinsk militia for Sergei Gorichev, Russia’s 1984 judo champion, who met his end in a hail of gunfire as he was returning home a week ago. Even the president of the Russian Judo Federation, Gennady Kalyet-kin, seemed quite neutral about it.
“He was engaged in Chelyabinsk with criminal business and his death was a result of a conflict between contradicting interests,” he said laconically. “Many of the ex- sportsmen who are in the martial arts get involved in the protection-racket game. Our country was very strong in these sports and we have many champions who become `people of authority’.” That is code for a Russian Godfather.
Anonymity is perhaps the best defence against society’s many predators. Yelena Makarova, the Russian tennis player who played in last week’s Kremlin Cup, travels every day by Metro from her flat to the indoor tennis courts. She says: “I don’t feel unsafe here but many of my foreign friends, tennis players, are afraid to go to Russia. I never had any confrontations and I hope I don’t have them in the future. But sometimes I feel anxious. I go on the Metro and, if you remember, there was an explosion on the Metro. On the other hand, a drunkard can always knife you, but I am not thinking about this all the time.”
One former Soviet star, the pole vaulter Sergei Bubka, dares not even venture into Russia without the protection of bodyguards. Last year Bubka – who has become a millionaire through athletics and is notorious for only ever increasing his world record by a centimetre a time so as to maximise his earnings – refused to compete in an indoor meeting in Moscow because the cash-strapped organisers could not afford to pay for armed protection.
Bubka’s demands were not just the whim of a sporting prima donna: three years ago, shortly after he had moved to Berlin, Bubka received death threats from Mafia gangs from Moscow. He has since moved to Monte Carlo.
For those who remain, there are other problems. Although Svetlana Masterkova, the Olympic 800m and 1 500m champion, winters in Spain she retains a house in Moscow. She asks herself whether the old days of the Soviet Union were that bad after all. “You are not going to believe this. Last summer, the only place I could change clothes was either in the lavatory or in the street. The changing rooms at Luzhniki [Moscow’s Wembley Stadium] had been taken over by the managers of the flea market that now uses the stadium.” Contracts, sponsors, personal managers and public relations advisors have arrived in Russia, but the free market has as yet failed to re-start the formidable conveyor belt of developing talent maintained by the Soviet Union.
“[In the old days] we felt a privileged part of society,” Masterkova says. “The factories and sports societies were paying our expenses, for our food and our equipment. If you achieved a measure of success, you got a free flat. Now it’s completely different. Only those at the top can count on getting something from the market.
“The worst aspect is that sport has stopped being a mass activity. We have lost our best trainers. Most of them are now preparing Olympic athletes of other countries. Today’s winners like myself were trained in Soviet times. That was when the steel was forged.”
But despite all the problems Masterkova remains fiercely attached to her country, a land that has always taken some pride in defying the rules that the rest of the world is happy to live by. “What do you mean leave? When I finish competing we will certainly live in Russia, not even in Moscow but in Samara. That’s my husband’s native town and where all his friends are.
“The good times will return to Russia. It will be when people who have earned their money return to see sport in the stadia. When the factories are working again. That is when it will come right.”
ENDS