Olympic champion Sergei Kapustin grabbed his pale son and ran towards the road. The Spartak doctor did not help the boy, so the hockey player decided to hitch a ride to the local hospital. When Sergey handed over his son to the doctors, it was already too late. The hockey player lost his first child due to heart failure.
CSKA forced him to join the army
Kapustin returned home and told his wife: «That's it, hockey is over! I can't play anymore.» The wise wife immediately reassured her husband. Sergei was 27 years old — for an athlete the heyday.Tatyana persuaded him not to quit sports and honestly admitted that she was pregnant again. This fact saved the hockey player from a rash decision. After the events mentioned above, he won the World Championship three more times. Already at the age of 18, he moved to the Moscow “Wings of the Soviets”. They made a bet on the young striker. Sergey became the creator of one of the main sensations of Soviet hockey. In 1974, «Wings» outstripped the most powerful capital CSKA, having won gold medals in the championship of the USSR.
Of course, the national team coaches could not ignore such a bright striker by inviting Kapustin to the national team. In the same year, Sergei won his first world championship gold medal, becoming the best sniper of the tournament in Finland along the way. In one season, he went from being an ordinary player to a real star. Two years later, Kapustin became the Olympic champion in Innsbruck.
All the teams wanted to see him. CSKA was most actively interested in Sergey. In May 1977, a bell rang in the Kapustins' apartment. Viktor Tikhonov stood on the threshold.
"Viktor Vasilyevich, I just can't leave my native team. Otherwise, I will let the coach and all the guys down. "Wings of the Soviets" — my house! It was from this club that I got into the national team. Why should I seek good from good?" Sergey unexpectedly answered.
He was already so attached to his native “Wings” that he did not want to leave even after the request of the great Tikhonov. However, Viktor Vasilievich firmly decided that the team needed Kapustin. The army team had to connect administrative resources.
A few days later, Sergei was just walking down the street in Setun, when several large men in uniform flew up to him at once . He was loaded into a car and taken to the military registration and enlistment office. No complaints and granting a reprieve did not help. Kapustin was taken to the army.
Of course, all this was CSKA's plan. Sergei simply had no choice. Instead of two years of military service, he played for the army. After that, Kapustin wanted to leave, but the club pressed again and insistently asked to stay for another year. They begged not to break the links of the team before the Olympics in Lake Placid. However, the striker failed to play in the tournament in the USA.
The wife blamed the doctors for the death of her son
The injury left Kapustin out of the squad for the 1980 Games. That year turned out to be incredibly difficult for Sergey due to the loss of his son.
" the doctor could not find a vein in his arm and did not think of giving an injection in the temple. We lost a child due to the negligence of doctors and untimely help", Tatyana recalled years later.
In the same year, his «slavery» in CSKA ended. Kapustin moved to Spartak. There he was reunited with coach Boris Kulagin, who revealed the striker in the «Wings». It seemed that all the worst was left behind, and life got better. national team for a training camp in front of Sarajevo. However, a few days before the announcement of the application for the tournament, he suffered a groin injury. Sergey could give injections, play through pain. The hockey player would not have had time to fully recover anyway. Then the striker approached the coaches and asked not to include him in the squad.
I am left without money and died at the age of 42
At the end of his career, Sergei played in Austria for a couple of years, and then returned to the USSR. In those days, sports stars did not receive huge money. Kapustin failed to save up for a comfortable old age. The former player had to work as a taxi driver and loader in order to somehow feed his family. He himself did not see anything shameful in this.
Kapustin's life was interrupted at the age of 43 due to an absurd accident. On a hot summer day in 1995, he went for a swim after work in a nearby lake. When Sergei dived, his elbow caught on a nail coming out of a piece of wood lying at the bottom. «An ordinary scratch,» he said to his wife when he came home.
A day later he had a fever, his elbow was inflamed. Kapustin went to the hospital. Doctors made a terrible diagnosis — blood poisoning. A few days later, Sergei died. He was buried in the same grave with his son.