Ovechkin in St. Petersburg

Alex Ovechkin will be in St. Petersburg on August 1 to August 6, according to AllHockey.ru. He won't participate, but will be a guest of the Puchkov memorial hockey tournament, along with Radulov, Malkin, Gonchar and Igor Larionov.

Ovechkin is still training with Moscow Dynamo hockey team. Dynamo.ru has an article about Dynamo players collecting money for a young hockey player Igor Antosik who died while running cross-country race a week ago. He was a Moscow Dynamo alumni. This is a third Russian hockey player in the last 10 years who died in cross country race during pre-season training.

In 2001 the captain of Tolyatti Lada (Alex Semin's former team) Vyacheslav Bezukladninkov lost consciousness (and later died) while running a cross-country race with the team. In 1988 the same happened to another Tolyatti Lada hockey player, Andrei Zemko.

Anyway they interviewed Alex Badukov, one of the team leaders:

Q.: Did the cross country race last for more than an hour like it was during the first workout?

A.: Yes, and I love it. Today Sasha Ovechkin joined us... We immediately increased the pace, but he stayed, didn't drop from the race...


Here's what Ovechkin said about those cross-country races (from his interview to Sport-Express, July 18, 2008)

Who of your coaches had the toughest monstrous workout program? Krikunov. Maybe another one was Bilyaletdinov. What I saw in America, their workout regimens are not even close. That's why I never had any problems in Washington's pre-season training camp. Were there the drills after which you'd cry? Cross-country race. 10 kilometers at the time. Around the training camp in Novogorsk? No, around the soccer field at the stadium. Everybody was running like crazy, the pulse was over two hundred. Some couldn't finish.

Correction: The interview with Alex Badukov was conducted by Dmitri Ponomarenko, SovSport.ru, and Dynamo.ru just reprinted it.