Golden Dream. How basketball Petersburg traded «Spartak» for «Zenith»

Sergei YaremenkoCorrespondent SportAll materialsZenit Petersburg on Sunday beat CSKA Moscow in the seventh match of the final playoff series and became the champion of the VTB United League for the first time in history. «Spartak» Kondrashin and after him Zenith «(one championship and one victory in the USSR Cup) and hockey SKA (two bronze medals of the USSR championship), and volleyball «Avtomobilist», which won the championship gold three times and won four European cups. And basketball Spartak. The team of Vladimir Kondrashin (the coach led the club for 28 years — from 1967 to 1995) regularly climbed the podium of the USSR championship, once took gold from the mighty CSKA (in 1975) and won the European Cup Winners' Cup twice (in 1973 and 1975). ). In 1992, the St. Petersburg «Spartak» became the first (and only) champion of the CIS. The legends of the Leningrad «Spartak» — Vladimir Kondrashin and Alexander Belov helped the USSR national team achieve the main success in its history — to win gold at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. Kondrashin headed the national team, and Belov was its key player. It was he who scored the decisive ball at the end of the final game against the Americans.

Vladimir Petrovich Kondrashin, coach of the USSR national basketball team. Coach V.P. Kondrashin and basketball player Alexander Belov (center team «Spartak», Leningrad) during the game. In the early 2010s, he even achieved notable success: he played in the Final Four of the Eurocup and won bronze medals of the Russian Championship — 2012/13. Especially for Spartak, in 2013, the Sibur Arena was opened on Krestovsky Island. A stone's throw from the place where the protracted construction of the football stadium for the 2018 World Cup was going on at that time. The big problems for the Red-Whites began suddenly — in the summer of 2014, when the long-term contract with the general sponsor, Novatek, ended. The Spartak players, who lost their funding, were forced to leave the VTB United League. The President of Spartak, Alexander Uritsky, in an interview with Fontanka, said that the departure of the Red-Whites from the elite division was predetermined. «Two years ago, when I just came to basketball and got acquainted with people, including the leadership of the VTB United League, the former and current leadership of the RFB, all the layouts were given that I ended up in a club that was, if not persona non grata, then close to it. Even then it was known that the former head of the RFB and the head of Spartak (Alexander Krasnenkov) a few years ago had the imprudence to enter into an open conflict with a simple fan of CSKA Sergei Ivanov. And everything that then happened to the club was an irreversible consequence of this fact, «Uritsky said. In 2015, Spartak» revived and declared to participate in the second division of the Superleague, but at this level the club lasted only five years. During this time, the «red-whites» have risen to the first division of the Super League, but in the summer of 2020, the club's management announced that the team would miss the next season due to the pandemic. At the same time, a legal entity «BC» Spartak «Leningrad region» was registered in the city of Luga. True, the idea of ​​​​moving to a neighboring region was never implemented — in August 2021, the arbitration court of St. Petersburg registered a claim for bankruptcy of Spartak.