Athletistic/Hockey. Sochi captain Gleb Koryagin spoke about the current head coach of Nizhny Novgorod Torpedo Igor Larionov. In his youth, the 29-year-old Russian went to play in North America.

“How did I end up at the very beginning of my career in the American league, the name of which is even difficult to decipher? It’s just triple A. I was in the best American league for players under 18 years. We had I just finished my studies, and either I went to Stupino… No, I went to Dmitrov, but there I could not gain a foothold in the youth team.

18 years old, what are the next options? It didn’t work in Russia, so I went to the United States. There were four of us Russian speakers. Sam Babintsev, Alexander Kamzolov, Daniel Hernandez and Belarusian Egor Voronov. And Igor Larionov worked on it with us. HE was watching us. Larionov was not the club’s coach. It’s just that he was living in the United States at that time and we did some extra work with him. He gave us various advice, attended almost all home matches and suggested some nuances of the game. In general, Larionov helped us a lot. Basically, we went there to see it.

Igor Nikolaevich gave us a lot in terms of the training process. He told us a lot of little things, details and nuances. Larionov provided us with a figure skating coach, with whom we also trained. We also had a separate trainer in the gym. That is, it was such a cool job that at that time it was impossible to get it in Russia,” Koryagin quotes in “Championship”.

Igor Larionov is one of the rare hockey players in the world (along with the Russian Vyacheslav Fetisov and the Canadians Sidney Crosby, Jonathan Toews, Patrice Bergeron, Corey Perry and Scott Niedermayer) to have managed to win all the major world hockey titles: the Olympic Games, the world championships between adults and juniors, Canada or the World Cup, as well as the Stanley Cup.


@sportru