I go out to the heavy projectile
With a heavy feeling of tenderness
to him.
We both seem to be with him
made of metal,
But he's the only one really
metal.
And it took me so long to reach the podium,
that there's a dent in the platform
trampled.
These lines by Vladimir Vysotsky are about him, about the undefeated champion of Soviet sports, the heaviest man in the country, Vasily Alekseev. Vysotsky wrote this poem after a Soviet weightlifter pushed a 500-pound barbell (227.5 kg) at the 1970 World Championships in the United States, thereby setting another world record. Then Vasily Alekseev conquered not only America, but the whole world.
On the evening of Friday, November 25, sad news overtook us: two-time Olympic champion Vasily Alekseev died in a clinic in Germany. 2 weeks before, he was sent for treatment to a cardiology clinic in Munich, Germany. Doctors assessed his condition as serious. And now Alekseev is gone.
He gave one of his last interviews in June of this year to an RG correspondent at his home in the city of Shakhty. Here, in an ordinary one-story house, Alekseev lived, as he did 20 and 30 years ago.
The silent wife was quietly busy in the kitchen and seemed to be only a shadow of the great athlete. But in fact, in this family it is simply not customary to show off your feelings. And Vasily Ivanovich, at the very end of the conversation, suddenly casually admitted:
My only and beloved wife. We miss each other when we are apart. Now it’s good, there’s a phone, you’ll call 12 times a day, and she’ll call 12 times, for a total of 24. Next year it will be 50 years since we’ve been together.
The wife of the most powerful man on the planet is like a talisman. Her name is Olympics. Thanks to her, Alekseev became a multiple champion. When they asked him: “How many times have you won the Olympics?” He answered: “Three. In Munich - zero times, in Montreal - two. And the third is the Ivanovna Olympics.”
In 2012, the Alekseevs were waiting for two anniversaries at once - the golden wedding and the 70th anniversary of Vasily Ivanovich. For his birthday, he had two wishes - to learn “Eugene Onegin” by heart and to sit down to write his memoirs.
RG: Even Vysotsky dedicated a song “Weightlifter” to you. “I performed a short movement with a short evil name “Snatch”. Exactly about you. Are you always like this, with character?
Alekseev: In life I am not at all menacing, but fluffy. Many people tell me: you have a difficult character. What scales can this be measured on? I think I have a normal character. I have a lot of friends, they are drawn to me, and no one considers me a difficult person. Someone created an image and off we go... So much nonsense has been written about me. They said that during the Soviet years I went hungry and bought bread by the bagful. Yes, there were few products then. I lived in Ryazan, where they made such indigestible bread, and so I went to Moscow for fresh loaves. And so as not to run around every day, I immediately took a bag of Borodinsky. And now I was in Kyiv, where Oleg Blokhin made up the idea that I drink milk by the liter. I told him: “Oleg, I never drank milk at all, because for me it’s a storm, especially before competitions.” Can you imagine?
RG: Do you consider yourself rich?
Alekseev: I think so. In terms of everything, he is rich in friends, in friends. The family was successful: 2 sons, 4 grandchildren. The sons trained to be lawyers. The youngest, Dmitry, was involved in weightlifting - I taught him myself. But, having become the head coach, I forbade him to continue training. Soviet education: so that no one would say anything that it was I, the father, who took my son to the training camp and took him abroad. True, I later regretted doing so more than once. And the eldest, Sergei, was not for sports from the very beginning - he immediately went to study. He received a diploma with honors and is now a Doctor of Science.
RG: You once came up with your own training method, there is no such thing anywhere in the world, and then you proved its effectiveness by your own example. But on principle they did not want to create their own weightlifting school. Why?
Alekseev: And the authorities discouraged anyone from training. They put so many spokes in the wheels. At first I was forced to do this, because I had to work somewhere after leaving big-time sports. But I am a mechanical engineer by education, I did not graduate from either the Institute of Physical Education or the Pedagogical Institute. When I didn’t want to stay in Moscow - I don’t like this city, I went to Shakhty, they told me, let them deal with you there. I didn't feel any support. And there were dozens of such former champions left idle. Many became drunkards. Take, for example, Alexey Vakhonin. He, a talented athlete, had neither education nor profession, and ended up working in a mine. But barbell is not a sport where you can swing a shovel for the entire shift and then go to training. Once it blew, twice - in the end he caught a cold, one was sick, the second, and the person left the race. Gash. He was kicked out of the brigade and went to dig graves. Then they fired me from there too. That was the end of it.
And not only he found himself in such a situation, a lot of champions - the Rostov region, the former Union. The main problem was that people were treated as waste material.
Now, maybe the situation is better, it’s not for me to judge. Although there is no sport left as such. There is no mass participation, no sports societies that existed under the USSR. I feel like an orphan: the Trud society, with which I began my career, has died, there are no VDSO trade unions. Where to go? What to rely on? What to remember?
From the RG dossier
Vasily Alekseev competed in the open weight category and won the 1972 Olympics in Munich and 1976 in Montreal as part of the USSR national team. He was an 8-time world champion, 8-time European champion, 7-time USSR champion. Set 80 (!) world records.
David Rigert, weightlifter:
Alekseev and I played for the USSR national team for 12 years, and during training camps we often lived in the same room. A powerful, strong man, he always knew what he wanted. He developed a whole system of the effects of physical activity on the human body. This technique helped him win. His favorite exercise was the barbell press. Nobody could come close to his bench press result - 237 kg.
Gennady Bessonov, weightlifter, team partner:
He was talented in everything he did. Moreover, in sports he is the least talented. Rigert was much more gifted, and some others as well. And the phenomenal results that Alekseev achieved were only due to work and character. Whenever they returned - from hunting, gatherings - they always went to the hall to plow.
After the victory in 1976, we were invited to the reception room of then US President Carter. We've been waiting at the reception for an hour and a half. And then Vasily stood up and said: “I have a lot of spare parts like the crankcase in the garage,” we laughed, turned around and left. The translator never understood the meaning of this joke.
There, in America, is Kennedy Airport. We ask the policeman where we should go. He: “Oh, Russian, go there.” We're getting there. And there’s another policeman: “Rushen?” And he points in the opposite direction. We go to the first policeman, we think about how to punch him in the face. And then Alekseev’s calm baritone: “I thought there were fools only in the Union, but it turns out that in America too.”
Olga Markina, deputy. Director of Youth Sports School No. 15 named after. Vasily Alekseev:
In 1997, when the Ministry of Sports decided to name our sports school after Alekseev, Vasily Ivanovich took it, as usual, with humor. When I dialed our number, I imagined: “The sign” is calling.” What a pity that the “sign” will never call again.
When sports schools across the country began to be transferred to municipalities, he stood up in defense. The city is subsidized, and becoming a municipal school means setting yourself up for a miserable existence. But now our school has produced 6 candidates for the Olympic team.
Vasily Alekseev rightfully bore the title of legend of Soviet sports. The weightlifter broke record after record, which were included in the Guinness Book of Records. He dedicated the song “Weightlifter” to the Russian hero, who managed to develop his own training method and show it in action.
Childhood and youth
The strongest man on earth is a simple village guy, the fourth child in the family. Vasily Ivanovich was born in the village of Pokrovo-Shishkino (Ryazan region). When the boy was 11 years old, his parents, for family reasons, decided to move to the Arkhangelsk region and settled in the village of Rochegda.
Free time from school and summer holidays were spent working. Little Vasya helped his father and mother prepare timber for the winter; they had to lift heavy logs. Once I organized a competition with the older boys to see who could squeeze the axle of the trolley.
The opponent managed to do this 12 times, but the future champion did not succeed. After the defeat, Vasily began to intensively engage in sports under the guidance of the school physical educator. Soon, not a single competition on a regional or regional scale could take place without Alekseev.
In 1961, a student at the Arkhangelsk Forestry Engineering Institute received first category in volleyball. At the same time, Vasily began to become interested in athletics.
It seemed to Vasily Alekseev that education alone was not enough; the young man also graduated from a branch of the Novocherkassk Polytechnic Institute. I managed to live in the Tyumen, Ryazan and Arkhangelsk regions. He spent several years in the city of Koryazhma, where he worked as a foreman at the Kotlas pulp and paper mill, and rose to the rank of shift manager.
Weightlifting
Weightlifting entered Alekseev’s life with coach Semyon Mileiko - under his leadership he took the first steps towards the championship. A year of training has yielded excellent results. Vasily Ivanovich lifted 442.5 kg, which was enough to be called a master of sports. But in Arkhangelsk they did not want to recognize the weightlifter’s achievements, so he went to the city of Shakhty.
Here, at the Yuzhnaya mine, the famous athlete, Olympic champion Rudolf Plückfelder trained the heavyweight guys. The cold master of sports took Vasily under his wing, but the student and teacher soon parted ways, not finding understanding between themselves. Alekseev devoted a year to independent training, during which he came up with and developed his own system of influencing physical activity on the human body.
The attempt to compete for the USSR national team for the first time failed, Vasily was excluded from the squad for health reasons - the weightlifter tore his back during training. Doctors strictly forbade lifting weights, but Alekseev did not listen to the doctors and in the winter of 1970 he broke the records of Joseph Dube and Robert Bednarsky.
In March of the same year, he set a record in triathlon total (600 kg). And three months later, thanks to Alekseev’s light hand, world achievements were adjusted in seven points. At the World Championships held in America, Vasily delighted sports fans by managing to lift a barbell weighing 500 pounds.
Then they expected victory at the World Championships in Sofia and the world championships in Lima. By his first Olympic Games, Vasily Ivanovich reached a total weight of 645 kg. And at the competitions themselves, held in Munich, he chose smooth tactics instead of sharp bench presses of maximum weight and set a new record in triathlon total - 640 kg. In addition to global recognition, Alekseev was also celebrated in his homeland by awarding him the Order of Lenin.
The weightlifter performed brilliantly at the next Olympics in Montreal. In 1976, the Russian hero managed to push 255 kg and lift 185 kg and again won the gold medal. By the age of 35, the athlete managed to take the podium of the world champion eight times, and by lifting the barbell by 256 kg, he set the 80th record. In the bench press, the athlete had no equal in the whole world.
In 1978, the champion decided to move away from the “big” arena, stopped participating in competitions, and directed his energy towards educating the younger generation. Vasily Alekseev founded and took the helm of the “600” club, where schoolchildren studied. He also tried on the image of a coach of the USSR national athletics team and until 1990 trained new champions.
After this, the man was put in charge of the national team of the Soviet Union (later the CIS) - in this position the athlete also achieved recognition: at the XXV Olympic Games, the team brought the country five gold, four silver and three bronze medals.
Personal life
Vasily Alekseev’s personal life, as well as his sports career, was a success. In 1962, the aspiring weightlifter got married. By luck, the wife's name was Olympias. The athlete joked that he won three Olympics, including one with his wife.
Vasily Ivanovich really considered the second half his talisman and assured that without her support there would not have been so many championship victories. The woman accompanied her husband at competitions and was a cook, a massage therapist, and a psychologist for him. At the end of his life, in an interview, the man admitted:
“My only and beloved wife. We miss you when we're apart. Now it’s good, there’s a phone, you’ll call 12 times a day, and she’ll call 12 times, for a total of 24.”
For three decades, Vasily Alekseev lived in Shakhty in a one-story wooden house. The couple raised two sons and had four grandchildren. Both heirs are lawyers by training. From childhood, the younger Dmitry followed in the footsteps of his father, who generously shared his knowledge in weightlifting.
However, when Alekseev became the head coach, he forbade his son to continue training. He justified such an act by Soviet upbringing - he didn’t want anyone to blame him for promoting his own child, for taking his son abroad.
The eldest son Sergei showed no interest in sports, but was endowed with a talent for science. He graduated from the university with honors and received a Doctor of Sociological Sciences degree. For his 70th birthday, Vasily Alekseev dreamed of two things - to memorize “Eugene Onegin” from cover to cover and to start writing memoirs. But I didn’t have time.
Death
In the late autumn of 2011, Vasily Alekseev suffered from a heart attack, and the two-time Olympic champion ended up in the Munich Cardiology Clinic.
The serious condition could not be normalized. On the evening of November 25, the hero, who glorified Russia throughout the world, died. Vasily Ivanovich was buried in Shakhty.
Awards
- 1972 - gold medal at the Olympic Games in Munich
- 1976 - gold medal at the Olympic Games in Montreal
- 1970–1977 – 8 gold medals at world championships
- 1970–1978 – 6 gold medals at European Championships
Eight-time world and European champion, seven-time USSR champion. He holds 79 world and 81 USSR records.
Two-time champion of the Munich and Montreal Olympics. Eight-time world and European champion, seven-time USSR champion. He holds 79 world and 81 USSR records. Honored Master of Sports of the USSR. He competed in the 2nd heavyweight division. With a height of 186 cm, he weighed up to 162.7 kg. He has been a member of the national team since 1970.
Vasily was born and raised in the village of Rochegda, Vinogradovsky district, and graduated from the Arkhangelsk Forestry Institute. An unknown 25-year-old Vasily Alekseev started at the IV Spartakiad of the Peoples of the USSR and lost to the champion L. Zhabotinsky 110 (!) kg. After 4 years, it was Alekseev who became the main hero of the V Spartakiad; in one evening he exceeded world records 7 times!
In January 1970, he began to storm the absolute record, exceeding the world records of the Americans R. Bednarsky and Dube, as well as his compatriot L. Zhabotinsky, showing a total of 595 kg in triathlon.
In March of the same year, Vasily Alekseev opened a new page in the history of world weightlifting. Competing in international competitions<Кубок дружбы>in the Minsk Sports Palace, he was the first in the world to gain 600 kg in triathlon!
Vasily overturned all the usual ideas about the limit of human physical capabilities. In April 1972 he set his 54th world record, gaining 645 kg in triathlon. The Belgian S. Reding and R. Mang from Germany, Ken Patera and D. Dube from the USA, G. Bonk and J. Heuser from the GDR, Hristo Plachkov from Bulgaria, A. Enaldiev and S. Rakhmanov (USSR) competed with Alekseev.
After the Olympic victory in Munich over<немецким чудом>R. Mangom, team captain Vasily Alekseev, at the end of the Olympic tournament in Montreal, lifted the heaviest barbell - 255 kg. The weight of the gold medal of the strongest athlete on the planet is 440 kg. There were eleven of them, super heavyweights. The total weight of the athletes is one and a half tons. The heaviest was P. Pavlasek from Czechoslovakia. Alekseev weighed 156.8 kg. The only one who intended to fight Vasily was the German weightlifter Bonk (world record holder in the clean and jerk 252.5 kg) who was fourth in the snatch.
Alekseev first pushed 230 kg. After silver medalist Bonk ran out of attempts, a fantastic number appeared on the scoreboard<255>. Alekseev lifted the monstrously heavy 255 kg, which an ordinary man could only push on the platform, so easily that he could push 260 kg. He set a USSR record in biathlon - 440 kg. He exceeded Bonk's world achievement in clean and jerk by 2.5 kg. With his performance, he delighted all weightlifting fans with indescribable delight. Montreal<Газетт>posted a photograph of the Soviet weightlifter Vasily Alekseev, accompanied by the caption: “The Russian hero confirmed that he has no equal.”
At the XXII Olympics in Moscow, V. Alekseev retired without making it past the initial weight. This became the main sensation of the weightlifting tournament. Alekseev's failure is explained by his long absence from the platform - after an injury received 2 years ago at the world championship in Gettysburg (USA). S. Rakhmanov repeated Alekseev's Olympic record of 440 kg, becoming the Olympic champion of the XXII Olympic Games. Since 1980 Vasily Alekseev conducts coaching work in the city of Shakhty.
In 1970 Vladimir Vysotsky dedicated “The Weightlifter’s Song” to him. Already Vasily Alekseev set many world records and wrote his name in the history of sports. But this was not enough for him. He always wanted to be the best. The best in the world, the best in history.
The first training equipment of the future athlete was... an axle from a trolley. The boy absolutely loved lifting it above his head. And he first saw a barbell only at the age of 19. And their relationship somehow didn’t work out right away: the thin, rough neck seemed very sharp to him. “I left after the first training session - I didn’t like the barbell,- Vasily Ivanovich said in a conversation with Dmitry Gordon. - And then they persuaded me to speak for the course, for the faculty, for the entire forestry engineering institute, and by spring I was already the champion of the course, the institute, and the region.” So he entered the championship race.
It’s amazing that Vasily Alekseev doesn’t have a single silver or bronze medal in the international arena. If you became a prize-winner, and you almost always did, you would definitely take gold – at 2 Olympics, 6 European Championships and 8 World Championships.
Alekseev became the first member of the so-called “six hundred club,” that is, the first weightlifter to reach the 600 kilogram mark in triathlon. The weight seemed unthinkable, but later the Soviet strongman managed to add another 45 kilograms to it. This record is called eternal. Probably, no one will really beat him anymore, since the standing press has been excluded from the modern weightlifting program.
Perhaps the most unique achievement of Vasily Alekseev is the sheer number of world records. The Soviet hero has as many as 80 of them in his piggy bank! Hardly any of the athletes can boast of such success. Among weightlifters, no one has come close to achieving such results and is unlikely to come close. At least today's champion weightlifters give the impression of being people of their time. And Vasily Ivanovich was ahead of his time. World records were not only obeyed by him - they could not keep up with him. Alekseev churned them out one after another, as if mocking the prevailing ideas in society about the limits of human capabilities. The fans still couldn’t get over his previous achievement, but he was already putting new kilograms on the barbell.
But Vasily Alekseev was by no means a darling of fate, to whom nature gave heroic strength and allowed him to lift enormous weights without difficulty. On the contrary, behind every record there is a colossal amount of work. The legendary athlete trained until it hurt, until he was completely exhausted, and moved on to a new exercise only when nausea crept up his throat. And here it is inappropriate to argue that, they say, all weightlifters train a lot. “A huge army of Soviet coaches adhered to one school, but I went a different way,”- Alekseev admitted. And if his colleagues in the workshop had enough to lift 4 tons during training, then he lifted 25 tons in the morning and 15 tons in the evening. Moreover, he liked to create the most uncomfortable conditions for himself: for example, starting training not early in the morning, but at noon, in the heat. A normal occurrence, according to the recollections of Vasily Ivanovich’s wife, was training late at night. “Now weightlifters come to the gym, but in the winter I trained in basements, in the summer - on the street,- Vasily Ivanovich told the same Gordon. - And all this tempered me and gave me purposefulness. Look, these days the guys are a perfect match: talented, healthy, they feed them to their fill, but there are no records.”
In addition, Alekseev showed himself to be an outstanding intellectual. He constantly experimented and looked for new techniques. Fans of the strongman know about his training in water. The barbell was lighter underwater, but the legs also moved slower (and explosive leg strength plays a crucial role in weightlifting). Another Alekseevsky know-how is bending over a goat with a barbell around the neck (hyperextension). With this exercise, Alekseev actively pumped up his lower back after a severe back injury. Of course, it was not he who invented the bends themselves, but it was from him that the bends became an important element in the training of new generations of weightlifters. Vasily Ivanovich learned to plan his training process so that by the time of the competition he was always at the peak of his form - an extremely important skill that not all athletes possess. In a word, the sport required incredible tension from Alekseev. And in this constant tension - physical, mental, psychological - the “Russian bear” remained from day to day, from year to year. This is how records were born.
By the way, Alekseev’s star in big-time sports lit up quite late. He began performing on the international stage only at the age of 28. For comparison, another great Soviet weightlifter Yuri Vlasov By the age of 28, he was already an Olympic champion and a multiple European and world champion. And this also shows how thorny Alekseev’s path to the top of the sport was.
At first, they didn’t have much hope for him. But he knew that he would be the best of the best. This is another secret of his success: both in the locker room and on the platform, the athlete was always unshakably calm and self-confident. He exuded some amazing inner strength that his rivals clearly did not possess. In the West, although Alekseev was nicknamed the “Russian bear,” it is more appropriate to compare him with a lion, the king of animals.
In everyday life he was as simple and calm as in competitions. Judge for yourself: “...we are sitting in the dining car, and four ordinary peasants are seated behind us. Suddenly one of them says: “There is the strongest man on the planet, Alekseev” (and before that I set four records and beat Jabotinsky in total). The second one echoes him: “Come on - some kind of goat is sitting” - and to me: “Do you hear, you goat?!” I didn’t answer: just as I was eating hodgepodge, bending over, I continue to eat, when a glass flies at the back of my head - and smashes it into pieces on my head! Meanwhile, I still have zero attention: I continue to finish the hodgepodge!” Of course, it would not be difficult for a strong man to twist the offenders into a ram's horn. But Alekseev soberly judged that he was dealing with provocateurs. If you answer them, in the end you yourself will remain guilty (and there were important competitions ahead). The rowdies were so impressed by the weightlifter's composure that they no longer approached him.
Vasily Alekseev did not allow himself to lose his dignity even in front of, as they say, big people. Even the US President was no exception. Athlete's team partner Gennady Bessonov recalls a funny incident: “After the victory in 1976, we were invited to the reception of the then US President Carter. We've been waiting at the reception for an hour and a half. And then Vasily stood up and said: “I have a lot of spare parts like a crankcase in the garage,” we laughed, turned around and left. The translator still didn’t understand the meaning of this joke.”
Ironically, after the collapse of the USSR, the experience of the greatest weightlifter in his homeland was not in demand, although before that Alekseev successfully coached the Soviet national team. Why wasn’t there a place for him on the coaching staff of the Russian team? We don't know this. Vasily Ivanovich himself answered simply: they didn’t invite him, so he didn’t go. It was beneath his dignity to ask.
In general, the collapse of the Soviet Union was a heavy blow for him. He admitted to journalists that he felt like an orphan. Until the end of his life, Alekseev was never able to get used to the new living conditions, where money and selfish interests took the place of the main values.
In 2012, he had to celebrate two big dates at once - the 70th anniversary and the 50th anniversary of marriage with his wife Olympiada Ivanovna. I was going to write my memoirs. Fate, alas, decreed otherwise. Vasily Ivanovich died on November 25, 2011.
Among the numerous domestic weightlifters, Vasily Alekseev was and remains the greatest. But he differs from the rest not only in his monstrous strength and number of records. In his behavior, in his conversation, in his very appearance, there is something close to every Russian person. There is no falsehood in it, it is beautiful in its simplicity. This is how we will remember him - the simple and sincere hero Vasily Alekseev.
Four years ago - on November 25, 2011 - the strongest man on the planet died. There is a common journalistic phrase, a cliche of cliches, which is constantly used in connection with the death of a famous person - “an era passed with him.” But you can’t say anything else about Alekseev. Undivided reign on the platform for many years is the era. Vasily Ivanovich was probably the first weightlifter who understood that “the strongest man” is a real title that should be carried proudly. He, of course, at one time was not offended by fame, honor or attention. But in these times of total commercialization of sports, he would be a superstar with fabulous advertising contracts, crowds of fans and millions of subscribers on social networks. Vasily Ivanovich was ahead of his time not only in sports.
Rail instead of rod
80 world records. Two Olympic gold medals. Sacks of letters from fans from all over the globe. His whole story is a script for a film. No, not a documentary, there have been quite a few of them, but a Hollywood sports drama. Such that tears come to your eyes and your soul turns around. Consider the case when Alekseev was deprived of his freedom for a month while the trial was going on. The drunken group took a liking to the Master of Sports badge, to their own misfortune. “Now do you understand that I’m not a master of sports in chess?” - said the future great champion to the opponents already lying on the ground. It was unlucky that one of the attackers was the secretary of the party cell. In conclusion, I trained so as not to lose shape. The rod was a rail weighing 90 kilograms.
The ideal weightlifter
At the end of the 20th century, all sorts of surveys summing up the results of the century were terribly fashionable. The best football player, the planet of all time, the best boxer, singer, actor, writer... All this, of course, is a matter of taste. But one rating stands out among its peers. Everyone involved in weightlifting - athletes, coaches, veterans - was asked to name the weightlifter who would be the standard. The majority spoke in favor of Alekseev.
The athlete himself has repeatedly spoken about the main secret of success: “Psychology. People came out onto the platform in such a state that it was amazing. If you look at one more closely than usual, you’ll see a hail of sweat. You exchange a few words with someone else, and then you start to blush and then turn pale. Our nerves were weak, so we lost. They always fought with me and the barbell. And you just need to use the barbell, without looking at anyone.”
Rainy day
Alekseev’s greatest pain and curse was the Moscow Olympics. The shock that gripped everyone. Subsequently, his performance that summer evening at the Izmailovo sports complex was sorted out many, many times. And the overall verdict turned out to be damning: when Alekseev was included in the national team, his titles and authority worked for him, but he himself was simply not ready. However, the athlete had a different opinion - he believed that his own coaches poisoned him then in order to bring him to first place Sultan Rakhmanov. Shortly before his death, he reported on the dialogue that took place after the Olympics. According to Alekseev, he was asked if silver would have suited him if he had lifted 170 kg. To which the two-time Olympic champion replied: “Then I would push as much as needed. And no silver."
Whether there really was poisoning, we will probably never know. The truth, most likely, as usual, lies somewhere in the middle. Before the Games in Moscow, Alekseev had not lifted his usual weights for two and a half years. But the desire to punish him could also have taken place, because the character of the Rostovite was not sweet. Masseur Valery Krylov, who once worked with him at the 1972 Olympics, said that Alekseev broke into the office of the then chairman of the sports committee, Pavlov, without knocking, and directly called the national team coaches idiots. “Nice guys never win,” she also sang Debbie Harry. Among the great champions, you can count the sincere and simple people on one hand.
Last flight
Lately, Alekseev very rarely left his hometown of Shakhty; he was often sick. He couldn’t stand Moscow doctors, calling them charlatans. The only exception was the sports and entertainment program “Big Races,” where he was the captain of the Russian team. Training and tuning athletes was nothing new to him; he was the mentor of the CIS team at the 1992 Olympics. By the way, the performance at those Games was phenomenal - 5 gold medals. The program was filmed in France and Spain, where Vasily Ivanovich flew with the national team. That’s where virtually everything happened – my heart couldn’t stand it. He was promptly taken to a Munich clinic, the doctors tried to do something. But there was practically no chance. And two weeks later he left...
The strongest man on planet Earth died as he lived - trying to bring victory to the team at international competitions. Symbolic. After all, strong people in terms of personality are like birds soaring high above the ground. And eagles never die in their nests. They always have enough strength to rise to the sky one last time.