| Albina Akhatova turned the championship in Khanty-Mansiysk into a holiday In a few decades, when archivists on the eve of the next biathlon season return to the history of this sport, the year 2003 will undoubtedly be called the year of Albina Akhatova. And it’s not even that the athlete representing the city of Labytnangi (Albina herself, however, lives in Tyumen) won two gold medals at the World Championships in Khanty-Mansiysk. Her “gold” in the mass start race was the first top award in the individual races of world champions for Russian women since 1997. Moreover, Albina won the small World Cup in this discipline (this also hasn’t happened for a long time). But that's not all. Ten years after the “Big Crystal Globe” of women’s biathlon was won by the legendary Anfisa Reztsova, Akhatova became the first Russian woman to intervene in the dispute in the overall Cup standings. And, finally, she made a decisive contribution to the victory of our women's team in the Nations Cup, and this has simply never happened in the history of Russian biathlon (the 1990 Nations Cup was the merit of the USSR national team). And this entire iconostasis - there is no other way to name the number of trophies obtained by Albina - was taken by a girl who had been under the strongest psychological pressure of the “doping case” for the last month.
Much has already been written about “native walls” and the help that their presence supposedly provides. No less has been written about the fact that all this is prejudice and nonsense (remember the “successes” of the Russian national hockey team at the championship in St. Petersburg), but what does our fan care about this? More than 20 thousand (according to data on the sale of tickets, each priced at 250 rubles) Khanty-Mansiysk residents and guests of the Ugra land came to Saturday's mass start race. Until this day, the Russian team had one medal of each value and fourth overall team place. The stands are still cheering for our team, but the newspapers are already full of malicious headlines: “The Russian national team’s plan is half fulfilled,” “Stones will soon fly at our biathletes,” and so on. It is already obvious that Akhatova will not be able to catch up with the German Martina Glagov in the overall World Cup standings and the end of a generally successful season for us is painted in dull colors, to which our fans, alas, are accustomed.
“Gold” and “silver” won by Albina Akhatova and Svetlana Ishmuratova in the last race of the season again made the fans believe in our biathlon. And the Russian duo, leading a caravan of “thirty crazy women” (this is how Albina herself perceives the mass start), flew to the finish line through a continuous noise corridor.
After three previous individual races, where the Russian woman failed to win awards, she was not too talkative. It was felt that she had something to say: both about the scandal that took place and about the missed World Cup - you can’t list everything. But she clearly wanted to say this not only in words. Akhatova was determined to end the year with an exclamation point!
“On one of the climbs, Sveta passed me, and I even thought that I couldn’t catch up with her,” Albina said after the race. “The thought even flashed: okay, “silver” is good too. But after a few minutes I suddenly felt a second wind and walked around Sveta. When I entered the stadium, I decided that I would win, no matter what it cost me. It’s a bit of a pity that I had to fight with my teammate, but, on the other hand, the thought that Russia would take the top two steps of the podium added to my joy.
- The doping scandal - did you remember it when going to the start?
“You know, I haven’t thought about him for a week now.” Today I rather remembered that the national team coach Alexander Selifinov is celebrating his 50th birthday. She even brought a bottle of champagne into the ski waxing room. Apparently, the premonition of the upcoming holiday did not deceive me. Georgy PETIN, Khanty-Mansiysk |
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