It was a cold January night at Moscow’s famed Luzhniki Palace of Sports, just 21 years ago but in a completely different world.
George W. Bush was in the White House. He had just looked into the eyes of Russia’s new President, Vladimir Putin. Afterward, Mr. Bush infamously said he’d seen into Mr. Putin’s soul and decided this was someone he could trust.
On the ice that night, an 18-year-old kid wearing the blue-and-white jersey of Moscow Dynamo grabbed a loose puck in the neutral zone and accelerated across the blue line as the opposing defencemen scrambled backward. After a series of fakes, he fired a snapshot from the high slot past the Yaroslavl Lokomotiv goaltender, breaking what had been a scoreless tie, then dove and jubilantly slid on his knees back toward his teammates. It proved to be the game-winning goal.
Reporter Mark MacKinnon interviews Alexander Ovechkin, then 18 years old and playing for Moscow Dynamo, at the Luzhniki Palace of Sports in Moscow in January, 2004.Guy Nicholson/Supplied
After the game, the kid wearing No. 32 for Moscow Dynamo – who would later become famous wearing No. 8 for the Washington Capitals – chatted politely with a Canadian reporter about the buzz that he was likely to be chosen first overall in that summer’s NHL draft.
Wearing a black tuque and a black Nike jacket, his cheeks red with acne, Alexander Ovechkin was such a fixture at Luzhniki – he’d come up through Dynamo’s youth hockey program – that even security staff at the rink called out to him by his nickname, “Sasha.”
He has since gone on to NHL superstardom, scoring his 895th career goal on Sunday to set the new all-time record, surpassing Wayne Gretzky.
Ovechkin and Wayne Gretzky were in Vancouver together for the NHL draft in 2006, when the latter was Phoenix's head coach. Two decades later, Ovechkin would be within reach of the Great One’s all-time record.Jeff Vinnick/Getty Images
If the world had remained the way it was in 2004, the game when the Great Eight passed the Great One would have been a moment to celebrate the unifying power of sport. The shy kid from Moscow, who was born in the Soviet Union but grew up in an independent, democratizing Russia, eclipsing the shy kid from Brantford, Ont. The memories of all those heated Canada-vs-USSR games – Bobby Clarke’s 1972 slash to Valeri Kharlamov’s ankle, the 1987 line brawl at the world junior championship – would have faded a little more as we cheered the passing of the torch.
But history has gone otherwise, tainting first Mr. Ovechkin and then Mr. Gretzky as it moved.
Mr. Putin, who was briefly seen as someone who could reform and strengthen Russia’s young democracy, instead crushed his domestic opposition, preparing the ground for a series of wars, including the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Meanwhile, Mr. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq set the United States on its own increasingly angry path that has culminated with the re-election of Donald Trump, a President who speaks admiringly of Mr. Putin and muses about annexing Canada the way Russia has illegally seized parts of Ukraine.
The Ovechkin I met in January, 2004, was obliging and humble, not unlike how Mr. Gretzky came across when he first aw-shucksed himself into the hearts of Canadians a few decades earlier.
“I don’t want to think about it right now – I just want to help Dynamo make it to the playoffs,” Mr. Ovechkin said via a translator when I asked him if he cared which team ended up drafting him. “When it’s draft time, I’ll think about it.”
He was shy and soft-spoken, the opposite of his already flamboyant on-ice personality – and nothing like the fun-loving face of the NHL he would become.
Mr. Ovechkin seemed to know little about the outside world, and nothing about any of Pittsburgh, Chicago, Columbus or Washington, the four teams that were front-runners to pick No. 1 that summer. (The Capitals had the third-best odds of picking first in the 2004 draft, but leapfrogged Pittsburgh and Chicago in the lottery.)
He told me that he had no favourite NHL team. Mr. Ovechkin’s hockey heroes, he made clear, were the stars of the Russian and Soviet hockey systems, not the NHL pantheon headed by Mr. Gretzky. He named Alexander Maltsev, a slick Moscow Dynamo forward who won two Olympic gold medals for the USSR, as his icon.
That patriotism, perhaps, provided a hint of what was to come.
Ovechkin counts Alexander Maltsev, left, among his heroes. He played for the Soviets in the 1972 Summit Series, where Dennis Hull, middle, Phil Esposito, right, were on Team Canada.Grigory Dukor/Reuters
Ovechkin’s Instagram profile features a photo of him with Putin.
Mr. Ovechkin’s legacy, in the eyes of many, will be tainted by the fact that he appears to have a close personal relationship with Mr. Putin, who is an avid hockey player and fan. Infamously, Mr. Ovechkin’s profile picture on Instagram is a photo of him standing in the Grand Kremlin Palace beside the Russian leader.
That choice of avatar has caused Mr. Ovechkin endless grief since the start of the invasion of Ukraine, but it still remains the first image you see when you visit his page.
It’s not a one-off, either. Mr. Ovechkin, who captained Russia’s 2014 world championship team, caused ripples by immediately presenting Mr. Putin with the trophy – just two months after the Russian leader had seized and illegally annexed Crimea from Ukraine. Three years later, Mr. Putin called Mr. Ovechkin to congratulate him on his wedding.
While Mr. Ovechkin’s defenders say he has no choice but to be publicly deferential to the dictator for his family’s sake, that rings hollow to the tens of thousands of Ukrainians, Georgians, Chechens, Syrians – and Russians – who have died fighting in Mr. Putin’s wars.
On the day after the invasion of Ukraine began – as missiles were raining down on Kyiv and other cities, and Russian troops and tanks were pouring over the border – Mr. Ovechkin simultaneously claimed he was not involved in politics, while also making his politics perfectly clear.
“Well, he’s my President,” he said, when asked whether he still supported Mr. Putin. “Like, I am Russian, right?”
Mr. Gretzky’s own awkward politics, meanwhile, have managed to mar Canada’s five-decade love affair with him.
The legend that every Canadian hockey fan knows – the kid who started out firing a tennis ball at his grandmother’s legs while she played goaltender in her chair, who stayed out late every night on his backyard rink and became the greatest scorer the NHL had ever seen – now has a tawdry epilogue. Mr. Gretzky went from captaining the national team at the 1987 Canada Cup to becoming the focus of nationwide ire after the now-dual national wore a blue business suit, rather than Team Canada gear, while serving as honorary captain for the final game of this year’s patriotically charged 4 Nations Face-Off.
Mr. Gretzky’s friendship with Mr. Trump – who has floated the idea of Mr. Gretzky serving as “governor” of Canada after it becomes the 51st state – has cost him his saintly status even in Edmonton, where he set many of his records. Last month, the city’s statue of Mr. Gretzky hoisting the Stanley Cup was smeared with feces.
Mr. Gretzky was in New York to congratulate Mr. Ovechkin after his record-breaking goal, just as Gordie Howe and Phil Esposito used to follow him around when he was breaking the records they had set. Unlike those iconic moments, in simpler times, there were likely some watching who jeered Mr. Ovechkin, Mr. Gretzky or both.
If a Canadian team had been involved in Sunday’s games, national anthems might also have been booed, reflecting the dark geopolitical era in which the kid from Moscow surpassed the kid from Brantford as the top goal-scorer in NHL history.
It could have been, should have been, a great moment. If only all that other stuff hadn’t happened, too.
Geoff Burke-Imagn Images via Reuters