Sharing experience
Enthusiasts Get Things Done
English summary of Tyazhelaya Atletika. Ezhegodnik 1986 (Moscow: Fizkultura i Sport, 1986), pp. 54–56: the text is paraphrased, not translated.
On the Mogilev specialised sports school.
The Dnieper at Mogilev is not as mighty as at Kiev, but on a sunny day it is just as quiet and friendly. “A wonderful place, isn’t it?” says Anatoly Leonidovich Lobachev, founder of the well-known specialised sports school that has given our sport many fine masters of the “iron game”. At the Dnepr tourist base young lifters spend the summer in tents, train in a forest clearing, play volleyball and basketball and swim in the river. In long rains the trolleybus terminus is near, so they can ride into town after lunch, train and be back by supper.
The school’s champions
Mogilev lifters made a serious mark in May 1982, when Dnepropetrovsk hosted the USSR Championships. The 75 kg class ended against expectations. Aleksandr Ayvazyan of the Moscow region started confidently, snatching 162 kg, above Nedelcho Kolev’s world record, then jerked 192.5 kg for a total of 352.5 kg. Vladimir Mikhalev of Mogilev still had a 195 kg jerk; he made it and, being slightly lighter, took the gold. At the close of that tournament Aleksandr Borisenok, at 110 kg, jerked 241 kg, beating the world record of Olympic champion Leonid Taranenko. In 1985 Borisenok won the two-lift title at Volgograd and, at the Leningrad centenary of Russian weightlifting, the USSR Cup in the super-heavyweight class.
Other names followed. At the III All-Union Youth Sports Games Leon Kaplun beat all the super-heavyweights, and in 1983 the school won the team title at the all-union competitions of young lifters aged 15–16. Mogilev lifters often excel in the scarce light classes: Oleg Kechko (52 kg), Feliks Tamarin (56 kg) and Vyacheslav Lazerko (67.5 kg). The first two won titles and exceeded master standards very young. At the XVII All-Union Schoolchildren’s Spartakiad in Tashkent Leonid Lobachev and Lazerko took top awards, and Tamarin beat his peers at the I All-Union Summer Youth Sports Games in Minsk. All trained under one roof.
Building the school
On Mira Avenue in central Mogilev, beside the Sports Palace, there once stood a shabby boiler house. Lobachev’s lifters began work on it in 1978, cutting up equipment and hauling away tens of tons of metal, concrete and brick, and trained under their own roof a year later. The facade now bears the words “Mogilev Regional Council of Spartak, Weightlifting Sports School”.
Nobody here waits for charity; they do everything themselves. There are two training halls, for thirty lifters and for fifteen, a recovery centre with a sauna, small pool and massage room, changing rooms, showers, a coaches’ room and rooms for reading, television, homework or a nap. Boys learn independence from the start: each washes his own kit and dries it in a special room. Lobachev and his assistants, all former pupils, impress with creativity and enthusiasm.
Specialised schools seldom have their own camps, and ordinary sports camps lack basic training conditions, so Lobachev arranged a tent camp with the Dnepr base. The Spartan life unites the team and hardens the boys against colds, and barbells, kettlebells and dumbbells travel with them.
Selecting country boys
Summer is also for selection. Experience shows that future lifters should be sought not in town but among country boys used to daily physical work: Borisenok comes from Kozulichi, Lobachev from Chkalovo, Tamarin from Berezino. Printed invitations go to rural boys in grades 6–8, who send in their details; the school calls them for a medical examination and interview, takes suitable ones to the summer camp and watches their diligence, adjustment to the team and character. This allows reliable selection for the sports boarding school, with losses kept minimal.
Lobachev himself is from the countryside, born at Kanichi in Mogilev Region. At school he took up athletics, skiing and volleyball; at the Belorussian Agricultural Academy he trained under the future Olympic hammer champion Romuald Klim and once easily lifted 70 kg overhead, whereupon the coach of the student lifters told him to switch to weightlifting. He was a Candidate for Master of Sport when he graduated as a land-surveying engineer, became a Master of Sport of International Class and Belorussian team member, and won bronze in the first heavyweight class at the 1968 USSR Championships. He later completed five years of correspondence study at the Belorussian Institute of Physical Culture.
Lobachev believes that bringing country boys into sport also educates them. Teachers from Berezino district wrote about the promising Feliks Tamarin, who grew up in a troubled family, and Lobachev took him in. Feliks trained as an instrument technician for the chemical industry and stands out for concentration and careful preparation of each lift.
Results and recognition
Thanks to this work, Lobachev’s pupils include national champions and all-union winners, four Masters of Sport of International Class and nearly thirty Masters of Sport. The first was Fyodor Konovalov, now a respected television repairman; others became builders, machine operators, engineers, doctors, teachers and officers. The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Belorussian SSR gave him a Certificate of Honour, and the USSR Sports Committee made him Honoured Coach of the USSR for preparing the national team that won the “Friendship-84” tournament. Leonid Leontyevich Gusakov, a fellow lifter who helped create the centre, has also been honoured.
Merited Master of Sport Valery Shary, twice world and European champion and Moscow Olympic winner, who began in the small town of Cherven in Minsk Region, said the essential thing is the enthusiasm of coaches and athletes and the interest of sports leaders, shown in demands on coaches and help for them, especially in remote areas where a coach who finds a talent may lack methods and experience. The regional sports committee and the Spartak regional council show this care for the Mogilev school, and so new champions will grow in Mogilev.