Ovechkin brings Stanley Cup to his homeland
MOSCOW — The silver sparkled in the late Sunday afternoon sunlight as the Stanley Cup made its way toward Red Square. Its bearer wore jeans, a black polo and a flat-brimmed National Hockey League all-star game cap as he strode toward the gated entrance with a small entourage circling him — makeshift security. But despite his otherwise nondescript appearance, the hulking chalice made Alex Ovechkin unmistakable, one of Russia’s most recognizable athletes carrying hockey’s grandest trophy to his country’s most iconic spot.
He was immediately swarmed as people tried to shove their way through the cameras following him to touch the trophy or the man. They pleaded for a photo or an autograph. They yelled their congratulations. “Great job, Sanya!” some shouted, calling him by his Russian nickname.
“Alex Ovechkin is in Red Square with the Stanley Cup,” one woman frantically whispered into her cellphone as she tried to keep up with his brisk strides.
With Saint Basil’s Cathedral in the background, Ovechkin stopped, and his agent and a Capitals spokesperson attempted to keep the crowd back. Ovechkin asked the people posted behind him to clear a path so that the cathedral could be visible.
“Can I please get a picture?” he asked of what had become a mob.
The crowd obliged, parting to create a clearing. He then hoisted the Stanley Cup above his head to the sound of cheers. Phones followed the Cup up to get the shot of Ovechkin finally returning home with the prize so many expected he would one day claim.
It’s been a month since the Washington Capitals won their first NHL championship, and in what was a weekend 13 years in the making, Ovechkin was awarded two days with the Stanley Cup in his hometown, a tradition for the winning team’s captain. For one of Moscow’s most beloved sons, it represented a prophecy fulfilled.
“I wanted to be the guy who brings the Cup,” said Ovechkin, who had promised as much as recently as last summer.
Ovechkin returned Saturday to the Dynamo hockey club facility where he played as a teenager and where there’s a large photo of him in the main lobby that he signed, “Thanks for everything.” When he was 14, Hall-of-Famer Igor Larionov, who won three Stanley Cups with the Detroit
Red Wings, visited Dynamo and spoke of his career and his championships.
As Ovechkin walked around his old locker-room a year ago, he told Dynamo coach Vladimir Vorobiev that he’d be back with the Stanley Cup and they’d drink beer together. Saturday, he had the Stanley Cup to his left with a tray of food on his right as his van pulled up to the training centre, an arch with light blue and white balloons and a pedestal for the trophy awaiting his arrival at the front of the building. He went through the back entrance for a few quiet moments first. This was where he ran laps after every practice and “hated it,”
Ovechkin said, still able to picture his father sitting on the bench watching him.
He set the Stanley Cup on a couch before he picked it up again and carried it up the stairs, where Dynamo has its museum. The signed jerseys and sticks of notable former players are in glass cases, and Ovechkin immediately picked out Capitals teammate Nicklas Backstrom’s display from when they played there together during the 2012-13
NHL lockout.
With the Stanley Cup still within his grasp, he turned in place as his eyes scanned the room, perhaps considering that soon a photo of him visiting with the Stanley Cup would be proudly displayed. After he told a group of kids in Dynamo jerseys to follow their dreams and then posed for photos with the Stanley Cup, Ovechkin laced up skates and carried the trophy onto the ice rink he once practised on, hoisting it up as someone on the bench warned him not to fall because the blades were dull. He then returned to the locker-room, set the Stanley Cup down and clinked frosted mugs with Vorobiev.
“You know, Alex is a big star,” Vorobiev said. “When he’s young, every guy who play with him, is working with him, he know he’s going to be a big star.”
It was after 1 p.m. on Saturday when the Stanley Cup finally made it through customs and Moscow traffic, at last in Ovechkin’s hands again. He set it on a table as he passed through a metal detector for a gathering of fans at the Moscow State University campus, there for a viewing party of Russia’s World Cup quarter-final soccer game against Croatia. As he lifted it up above his head for the crowd, one man yelled out to him, “We’ve been waiting for you our entire lives.”
Ovechkin posed for more than 3,000 photos as part of an event organized by the Putin Team, a social media movement Ovechkin started in November to support Russian President Vladimir Putin.
He shook so many hands that he later asked for a wet napkin. The night finished with a private party at a ritzy karaoke club with a guest list that included famous Russian actors, musicians, Capitals teammates Evgeny Kuznetsov and Dmitry Orlov and former Washington centre Sergei Fedorov.
After a hectic and public first day with the trophy, Ovechkin chose to make Sunday more private. He took the Stanley Cup to a closed hockey game with highranking government officials, including Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev — but not Putin. He visited his family’s childhood apartment, laying with the trophy on the twin bed he used to sleep in. Then he and his parents went to the cemetery where his older brother, Sergey, rests after he died from a blood clot following a car accident when Ovechkin was 10. The Stanley Cup minders stayed in the car as Ovechkin carried the trophy to the headstone.
“It’s hard,” Ovechkin said. “But I think it was very important for me personally because he’s my brother, obviously. He’s motivated me to play hard and give what I can on the ice.”
He then took the Stanley Cup to the most public place in the country, where the Kremlin walls enclose cobblestoned square with the colourful Saint Basil’s Cathedral at the centre of it. Fetisov and Larionov took photos there when they brought the trophy to Moscow, but Ovechkin was quick to point out that his moment was different — “I’m pretty sure there was not lots of people around them,” he said.
They’d been waiting for that iconic shot as long as he had.