The team of stubborn Ukrainian ice hockey veterans celebrated a tough 7-6 victory on ice Feb. 12 in Kyiv over their counterparts from Russia, who played for the former Soviet Union ice hockey veterans’ hockey club.
The Russians scored first, when 60-year-old Victor Shalimov, the Moscow Spartak superstar, locked the pass from Sergey Zhebrovsky.
The Ukrainian team evened the score, but the Russian side was swift to seize the initiative again, when 59-year-old Alexander Golikov from Penza, who played for Dynamo Moscow and Khimik Voskresensk, scored again.
Ukrainians again pulled to even and then ahead in the second period after two goals scored by Ravil Yuldashev (quite in the 1990-91 style, when he became the best bombardier of the Soviet Supreme League with 36 goals) to finish the game 7-6.
It was a tough game and a pleasure to watch.
Many of the hockey veterans had difficulty walking aferwards, but showed the wonders of old-fashioned power skating to many younger players in attendance.
As 41-year-old Oleksander Godynyuk, Ukraine’s first-ever own NHL recruit (who played for the Toronto Maple Leafs and Calgary Flames) put it, this was a first-in-decades opportunity to watch decent ice hockey on ice in Kyiv, even though Ukraine’s own national squad just played on the same ice a couple days before, losing to Italy.
The opportunity to watch superstars like the Golikov brothers and Victor Shalimov playing on Kyiv ice — and the incredibly game-pace of competition despite the fact that players on ice were well in their 40s or even 50s – showed top class.
Vladimir Babashov, the former Sokil player from Penza, played for the USSR veterans in this game. Despite agem, Babashov skates every week and so do other stars from Russia, most of them, coming from Moscow super clubs.
The legend says that Ukrainian hockey was given a major kick-start in 1963, when former Soviet Communist party boss and ice hockey fan Leonid Brezhnev asked Volodymyr Scherbytsky about why things were slowly developing in Ukrainian ice hockey.
By that time, many ethnic Ukrainians played in the NHL, including the likes of Bill Mosienko from Vancouver, whose unbelievable hat trick in 21 seconds in his Chicago Black Hawks vs. New York Rangers on March 21, 1952, even today remains unrivaled.
Following Brezhnev’s order, a new ice skating rink Ldinka (Kryzhynka in Ukrainian or Icicle) was built in downtown Kyiv between the place where Olympic Stadium and Sports Palace are today, and ice hockey club Dynamo was established, later to be renamed in Sokil (Falcon).
Ukraine’s ice hockey peaked in 1985, when at the start of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, the leading club, Sokil Kyiv, was the only one from Ukraine playing in the former Soviet 12 clubs Supreme League.
Moscow was and still is the capital of the world ice hockey. Nowhere else in a single city are so much human and financial resources devoted. Dozens of sports schools, excellent skating rinks, professional press, sponsorships and national recognition could make many nations envy such enormous wealth of ice-hockey tradition.
Ukrainians have reason for envy and should understand why many young prospects go to Russia. “Ie hockey follows big money,” says Yevgeny Sobchenko, father and the first coach of the famous Ukrainian Daniil Sobchenko, who played for Russia’s Hockey Club Yaroslavl and who died at just the age of 20 on Sept. 7 in an airplane crush on the way to Minsk, Belarus). The father believes his younger son, Ilya, will also play in Russia.
The only way the situation is bound to be altered is if Donetsk-based oligarchs started pumping loads of cash into the development of the sport.
There are signs of an awakening here.
The Donetsk-based Donbass club now is leading in the teenagers’ league, led by the former Sokil star, now one of the leading Ukrainian coaches, Valery Sidorov.
Kyiv clubs Sokil and Berkut, as well as clubs from Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk, have very strong ambitions.
There are good chances that fierce and often bitter competition with “Donetskie” will help younger generations of Ukrainian ice hockey players beat their rivals from neighboring Belarus or even from Moscow, like Ukrainian veterans did in Kyiv Sports Palace on Feb. 12.
Dmytro Mossienko, a freelance contributor to the Kyiv Post, is editor-in-chief of OILMARKET magazine at http://www.oilmarket-magazine.com. He can be reached at [email protected].
