Alexander Ivanov

I spent nine years doing judo. To a point where I eventually had to face a choice between a normal, fulfilling life and professional sport, which, as a matter of fact, doesn’t always lead to victories. I went with the former, but still wanted to be involved in sports, so I figured out sports journalism was the way to go.

Sport is one of those spheres that keep changing every day, something new going on all the time.

Before, a sportsman would rely on his natural abilities to set a record, but nowadays what he needs is the right medical products. There’s an invisible pharmacological competition going on in the world.

Football, hockey, basketball and other team sports form a separate category, especially nowadays, when a lot of it is about commercialization. Olympic sports are what you could call “poverty-stricken”. Take track and field athletics, for example, you can’t make as much money on it as you could on, say, football.

There’s a lot of money allocated to sports in our country, but how much of it actually reaches the recipient is another question.

Sport boosts one’s confidence. A person, who has never done sports, when he gets into a stressful situation, might give up straight away. But sportsmen develop resistance to stressful situations. Apart from everything else, sport teaches one to value his free time and keep to a fixed schedule.

If you compare today’s Olympic Games with those that took place 20 years back, you’d see that the age of competitors these days is much younger than it used to be. The type of pressure modern sportsmen have to cope with is only suitable for a juvenile body.

I’ve heard about a guy who was 23 when he came to a coach and said: “I want to be a wrestling champion.” And what do you think happened next? Thanks to his personality, his inborn determination to win, he trained as hard as he could, like they say, worked his back off. And in the end he did win the Olympic Games. But that’s an exception.

It’s sad to realize that as the years go by, the body starts demanding less and less adrenaline.

Every sportsman has a personal agent who sorts everything out for them: starting from shopping and finishing with signing contracts with clubs. He would normally stay with the sportsman “from the very beginning till the very end”.

My ultimate dream is to fully realize my potential in this profession, but in my own way. What I mean here is finding a club that could be a perfect embodiment of my ideals in the spheres of journalism and PR. There’s a sportsman, but there are also people who work parallel with him — a team that makes this sportsman. When these poles match and coordinate, you get an exemplary club.

I prefer cultural entertainment: theatres and museums!