Sport

Sport is as popular in Russia as it is in many other countries, and Russians all over the country enjoy watching and doing lots of different types of sport all year round.

Winter sports

Winter sports are very popular in Russia and the cold weather in lots of parts of the country during the year means that people have plenty of opportunity to practise! People of all ages enjoy winter sports such as ice-skating and ice hockey.

Ice hockey

Source: ctnews.ca

Ice hockey is an especially popular sport for Russians because the national team is very successful. Russia is in the Championship Division of the International Ice Hockey World Championship which is a tournament that takes place every spring against other national teams from across the world. There are six players on each team and the aim is to get the puck into the other team’s goal by passing and dribbling it between the players. It is a very fast and exciting sport, and as it is a contact sport it can sometimes be quite dangerous so the players have to wear protective helmets and knee, shoulder and body pads. There is a junior ice hockey team which is also very successful. As well as its national team, there are lots of regional teams across the country and several national tournaments that different regions play in. Many young people enjoy going to watch their regional team play in games against teams from other regions.

Ice-skating

Ice-skating or figure skating is an artistic sport which many people in Russia enjoy watching and participating in. In competitions, skaters can perform as individuals, in pairs and in groups. Skaters skate around the ice rink doing intricate and complex routines with lots of jumps, balances and twists. Russia has some very famous figure skaters and is well-known for being especially successful in figure-skating at the Winter Olympic Games. At every Winter Olympic Games from 1964 to 2006, Russia won gold medals in the figure skating competitions. One very famous skater is Evgeni Plushenko who has won lots of gold medals in many international competitions and who is very popular all over Russia. Yulia Lipnitskaya is a figure-skater who became the youngest Russian athlete to win a gold medal at the Winter Olympics when she competed in Sochi in February 2014 – she was 15 years old at the time. She is from Yekaterinburg but now lives in Moscow where she trains, and she has been competing in national skating competitions since she was just eleven years old.

Evgeni Plushenko. Source: inosmi.ru

Yulia Lipnitskaya. Source: zastavki.com

The Winter Olympic Games 2014

Logo of the Sochi Winter Olympic Games

In February 2014, Russia hosted the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi. Sochi is a seaside town in the south of Russia and the events were held both near to the coast and up in the mountains just outside the town. The main Olympic Park was near the seaside. Because it’s in the south of the country, Sochi is normally quite warm for a lot of the year, even in the winter, so some people weren’t sure it was a very good place to hold the Winter Olympics. But the games were very successful! The events included skiing, ice hockey, figure skating, speed skating and curling. Russia was very successful in the competitions and won 33 medals in different events.

The mascots for the games were a snow leopard, a hare and a polar bear, and the slogan for the games was ‘Hot. Cool. Yours’.

Source: hotelssochi2014.com

Sports for other weather

As well as winter sports, Russia is famous for being very successful in international competitions in lots of other sports, especially gymnastics and tennis.

Gymnastics

Russian gymnastics is well-respected both at home and in other countries and Russia has a lot of success in international competitions. Young Russian gymnasts take their sport very seriously and devote their whole life to it. Russians are very proud of their gymnasts and they have a lot of support as they grow up training to be the very best. Those who are aiming to join the national team train at camps like one called ‘Ozero Krugloye’, which means ‘Round Lake’, which is about 20 miles away from Moscow. It is a sports complex where the gymnastics teams train alongside the national swimming team. Most gymnasts who are training there will live there away from their parents – when they are not using the state-of-the-art training facilities, they have classrooms and libraries for studying and dormitories for sleeping.

Dormitories for young gymnasts. Source: tunegym.com

Living at the complex means that gymnasts can train for six hours a day (or more), and they can focus and dedicate their whole lives to becoming elite gymnasts without any of the distractions teenagers might experience.

Some young gymnasts from Ozero Krugloye. Source: tunegym.com

They are coached by the best coaches to represent their country at competitions all over the world, and there are doctors and masseurs in the complex all the time to treat gymnasts with injuries so they can get back to training as quickly as possible.

Maria Kharenkova (left) and Daria Spiridonova (right) and another of their teammates. Source: intlgymnast.com

Maria Kharenkova is a 16-year-old gymnast from a small town in the south of Russia called Rostov-on-Don. Her team mate Daria Spiridonova is also sixteen and is from Moscow. These two young gymnasts have both won medals at international competitions, thanks to their dedication and hard work in training. Look out for these two gymnasts at competitions in the future – they will probably be representing Russia for a long time to come!

Tennis

Maria as a young girl. Source: maria-sharapova.org

Tennis is equally popular in Russia. Maria Sharapova is one of the most famous tennis players from Russia. She was born in a small town called Nyagan (a town in Western Siberia) and started playing tennis when she was just four years old. When she was 14, she started playing professionally and quickly attracted the world’s attention as she won several international tournaments.

Andrey Rublev. Source: itftennis.com

A younger tennis star is Andrey Rublev who in June 2014 became the junior tennis world number one. He was born in Moscow and comes from a sporting family – his mother is a tennis coach, while his father is a retired boxer. Rublev played his first international tournament in Luxembourg when he was 13 years old and has now won lots of other international tournaments.

Football

Of course, football is also very popular in Russia, like in lots of other countries! In 2018, the FIFA World Cup will be held in Russia. Besides the Russian national football team, some of the other teams in the country include CSKA and Spartak from Moscow, as well as Zenit from St Petersburg.

Zenit St Petersburg team logo. Source: cascade-academy.com

Now it's your turn!

Use the alphabet decoder to find out which sport each of the below is:
баскетбол, бадминтон, теннис, футбол, хоккей

Look at the mascots for the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympic Games. Design a new mascot for the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

Make a poster to advertise a big ice hockey match between Dynamo Moscow and Ak Bars Kazan. You should include the time, place (which city?) and price, and make it very colourful with pictures to show it is about ice hockey.

Imagine you are a young Russian training at Ozero Krugloye to become a professional gymnast. Write a letter to your parents to tell them about your experiences – what do you like and dislike most about living at Ozero Krugloye? Are you excited or nervous about your next competition?

Find out more about sports schools for young sportspeople. This is a video about young people training to be wrestlers and divers at the Olympic Reserve School, a boarding school in Ekaterinburg.

More information and some suggestions for activities on schoolsonline.britishcouncil.org.