A Champion Lost Too Soon: The Sergei Volkov Story

Sergei Nikolayevich Volkov was born on April 19, 1949, in Moscow, which was then part of the Soviet Union. He took his first steps on the ice at the age of three and began seriously pursuing figure skating at the age of six. When his first coach Pyotr Petrovich Tikhonov retired when he was eight, he was passed along to Viktor Nikolayevich Kudryavtsev, then a relatively inexperienced coach. He was soon identified as one of the Spartak Moscow school's most talented young prospects.

In an interview for the newspaper "Sport Express", Viktor Kudryavstev recalled, "I loved working with him. Sergei's parents had nothing to do with sports and did not really deal with their son. They were too busy. His grandmother brought him to the rink. Later, I began to notice how much this affected the formation of the character of Sergei. He grew up very right and in a sense old-fashioned. Serious, quiet. He was respected by everyone who somehow intersected with him. First of all, because Volkov had an increased sense of justice. Any lie instantly infuriated him. Sergey was distinguished by one more quality - tremendous work capacity. In those days, it was fundamentally important: compulsory exercises - the 'school' - required the athlete to have great patience and perseverance... They had to work at least two and a half hours daily on this. I am sure that Volkov, with his ability to analyze and draw conclusions, could [have] become a very good coach. Although jumping was extremely difficult for him."

Photo courtesy "Skating" magazine

By all accounts, Sergei was a unique figure in the Soviet figure skating world at the time he was skating. Soft-spoken and quiet with almost snow white hair, he excelled in gymnastics and football and devoted much of his free time to collecting, of all things, daggers. He was stronger at school figures than in free skating, which suffered due to the fact that he had bad knees and suffered from a seemingly never-ending list of injuries.

When Sergei was sixteen, he actually decided to quit skating altogether to pursue his dream of being a pilot. He failed his admission test to the Rostov-on-Don flight school a total of four times because his knees gave out during parachute landings. He returned to skating and in 1968, was selected to represent the Soviet Union at the Winter Olympic Games in Grenoble, France. A virtual unknown, he placed eighteenth.

Left: Sergei Volkov skating a school figure. Photo courtesy "Skating" magazine. Right: Sergei Volkov at the boards.

Over the next four years, Sergei won four medals at the Soviet Championships and won the prestigious Prize of Moscow News competition. He wracked up three top ten finishes at the European Championships and at both the 1970 and 1972 World Championships, placing lower in free skating than in figures. At the latter event in Calgary, his teammates Sergei Chetverukhin and Vladimir Kovalev - both known as stronger free skaters - were second and third to his eighth in figures as well. That same year, he married pairs skater Lyudmila Olekhova. The couple had a son, Alexander, but later divorced. He later remarried and became a father of twin girls.

Top: Sergei Volkov, Jan Hoffmann and John Curry at the 1974 European Championships. Bottom: Sergei Volkov saying 

"Zdravstvuyte"

After Sergei Chetverukhin's retirement, Sergei won the Soviet title and finished second at the European and World Championships. His successes in 1974 were remarkable in that he was competing with a broken toe against a field of far more consistent free skaters. The following year, he lost the Soviet title to Yuri Ovchinnikov and arrived in Colorado Springs for the World Championships nursing a very serious knee injury. Amazingly, he performed what many considered to be the finest figures of his career to take a lead in the first phase of the competition. Though he placed only sixth in the compulsory short program and fourth in free skating, he shocked many by taking the gold by a considerable margin. Many claimed he only won because John Curry and Vladimir Kovalev hadn't skated their best, but in fact, he was so far ahead after the figures that his free skating result was largely irrelevant. Though he made history as the first Soviet skater to win a World title in singles skating and was made an Honored Master of Sports of the USSR, the press took little interest in his victory.

Stanislav Zhuk and Sergei Volkov.

Declining an operation for his knee injury, Sergei left Viktor Kudryavstev and began training with Stanislav Zhuk in the lead-up to the 1976 Winter Olympic Games in Innsbruck. Though he managed to reclaim the Soviet title, he finished a disappointing fifth at the European Championships in Geneva. He won the figures in Innsbruck, but not by the same margin he had the year prior at the World Championships. A disastrous showing in the free skating (one judge had him as low as fourteenth) dropped him to fifth overall. Because of his age and introspective personality, recalled one of his teammates, he was considered the "black sheep" of the Soviet team, with very few friends in the sport. He failed to make the World team the following two seasons and retired in 1978 at the age of twenty-eight. 

Sergei spent four years coaching young skaters with the All-Union Council on Physical Culture and Sports. In 1982, he began teaching skaters at the Sokolniki Ice Palace in Moscow for the DSO Spartak school. He worked with Tatiana Rachkova and a young Alexandr Abt and was Alexandr Fadeev's coach at the height of his success.

In February of 1990, Sergei took a position teaching skating in Austria. He returned that June in very ill health and was soon diagnosed with a potentially terminal illness. He initially refused an operation and when he agreed to have it, it was too late. 

Sergei was taken to Kharkov to seek an alternative medicine treatment. In an interview in "Sovetsky Sport", his sister Elena Buryak, who went on to be an international judge, recalled, "We, on the advice of friends, drove him to Ukraine, near [Kharkiv], where a psychic lived, capable of, as we were told, stopping metastases. Of course, this was a step of despair, the last straw that they tried to grab to save him, but a miracle, unfortunately, did not happen." He passed away at the age of forty-one on August 31, 1990. 

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