Putin advised Bogdanchikov

The head of Rosneft is now responsible for summer sports

President of Rosneft Sergei Bogdanchikov was yesterday elected president of the Summer Sports Association. Previously, this post was held by State Duma deputy Valery Kuzin, but after his sudden death, the position of the head in charge of summer sports in the country was vacant.

According to the President of the Russian Olympic Committee Leonid Tyagachev, the leadership of the ROC was looking for a “super-worthy” person for this position. There were a lot of people willing. So much so that two weeks ago Mr. Tyagachev turned to the country's President Vladimir Putin for advice. Yesterday, the head of the ROC described how this happened to everyone gathered in the building on Luzhnetskaya Embankment. “I compiled a list of candidates and went to Sochi with it. I asked the president: “What should we do? Who will bring the greatest benefit to the Olympic movement and Russian sports?” And I received the answer that I had secretly hoped for. “We have one great leader who knows and loves sports, is already helping many federations and is ready to help in the future - this is Sergei Mikhailovich Bogdanchikov,” the president answered. The leaders of the ROC took Putin’s advice as a guide to action.

At the general meeting of the Summer Sports Association, Bogdanchikov’s candidacy was unanimously supported. 21 delegates voted for him. And soon after the elections, the association was replenished with three more new members. Representatives of taekwondo, badminton and cyclists joined it. Currently the association unites 25 federations. True, the queen of sports, athletics, is still left behind.

It would be useful to remember that Sergei Bogdanchikov himself, although he was involved in athletics in the past, became more famous in big-time sports as a person who supports winter sports - cross-country skiing and biathlon.

Thanks to his financial support, which allowed skier Larisa Lazutina to switch to individual training on the eve of the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, the athlete achieved a stunning result - she won five Olympic medals, three of them gold. From 1993 to 1999, as general director of the Sakhalinmorneft campaign, Bogdanchikov sponsored a children's sports school of the Olympic reserve in the city of Okha, and in 1997 the school was recognized as the best in Russia. From 1999 to 2003, when he headed Rosneft, Mr. Bogdanchikov actually maintained two winter sports - skiing and biathlon. Moreover, he helped not just the national teams, but the entire vertical, starting with experimental groups, youth groups and up to the athletes of the main team.

The president of the company, overseeing a non-core area for himself, “proved himself to be an extra-class top manager who was well versed in this area,” Alexander Kravtsov, who headed the Rosneft sports club in those years, told Vremya Novostey.

After the elections, Mr. Bogdanchikov said that the priorities in his new work would be to ensure the successful preparation of our athletes for the Games in Beijing, strengthening the material and technical base of sports and strengthening interaction between federations, as well as ROC and Rossport. “I think that the main problems will be related to the lack of money. We will quickly resolve the issue of additional financing,” he concluded.

Olga ERMOLINA