An apple from an apple tree: children of sports stars sometimes choose an unexpected path

Plowing in halls, stadiums and skating rinks day after day, shedding tons of sweat when you have everything thanks to the achievements of your parents is very difficult. It also happens that the parents themselves, knowing how difficult gold medals, records and multi-million dollar contracts are given, dissuade their children from going to the end and offer to choose a less dusty and more respectable profession.

And yet, dynasties in the same sport are not uncommon. In St. Petersburg, many may remember Nikolai and Alexander Drozdetsky, Sergei and Nikolai Solodukhin in hockey, Vyacheslav and Ivan Zaitsev in volleyball, Vasily and Sergei Karasev in basketball, Sergei Sukhorochenkov and Olga Zabelinskaya in cycling, and so on.

But cases when the heirs of famous parents achieve success in other sports are already really rare. But they still exist. “MK in St. Petersburg” recalls children from star families who have chosen their own path in big-time sports.

A million dollars for a father on a cycle track

Kuznetsovs

Svetlana Kuznetsova is the winner of two Grand Slam singles tennis tournaments (US Open 2004 and French Open 2009), winner of 34 WTA tournaments (18 of them in singles).

Father, Alexander Kuznetsov, is a well-known cycling coach who raised seven Olympic and world champions.

Mother, Galina Tsareva, is a multiple world champion in cycling.

The elder brother, Nikolai Kuznetsov, is the silver medalist of the 1996 Olympic Games in the team pursuit race on the cycle track.

The most famous sports family in St. Petersburg, where the bike is a priority. But Svetlana, the youngest in the family, chose tennis. The head of the Kuznetsov clan once trained his wife and son. But Sveta did not dare.

“When it came to what she should do, I told my wife: “No, not cycling. I won’t train my daughter, ”Kuznetsov Sr. told Championship.com. – I remember that Galina objected: “Why do you think that you are? Maybe she will work with another coach? I answered her: “Then you will tell me that I am busy with other children, and I left my daughter. Let’s try something else””.

According to another version, at that moment the Kuznetsovs did not have a women’s group in the cycling center. What Svetlana was very happy about.

“In my environment, everyone was engaged in cycling, but I was not interested in riding and looking at the same trees at all. I don’t like racing. Yes, I just love to ride a bike – I did it a lot. But it would be boring for me to ride in a straight line all my career, ” — admitted the tennis player.

However, her father still took an active part in her career. If Sveta took her first steps in tennis under the guidance of her mother, then later, at a family council, her father insisted that she go to Spain, where she began to study at the famous Sanchez family academy, near Barcelona.

Playing with a racket and ball at a professional level is a very expensive pleasure financially, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars. Therefore, Kuznetsov Sr., who moved to the Pyrenees with his cycling team in the 1990s, constantly had to invest in the training of his daughter.

But the efforts were not in vain. In the past two decades, Svetlana has been part of the elite of women’s professional tennis and has won two Grand Slam tournaments – the US Open (in 2004) and Roland Garros (in 2009). Not to mention less prestigious tournaments.

During her career, Kuznetsova earned almost $ 26 million. And she spends them not only on herself. After winning the American Grand Slam tournament, she gave $ 1 million to her father for the construction of the Lokosfinks cycle track on Krestovsky Island, next to the Gazprom Arena.

The construction of the bicycle complex was not easy and stretched for 10 years. And it is not known whether it would have taken place at all if not for the help of Svetlana.

jump from dad

Fetisovs

Father, Andrey Fetisov, is the silver medalist of the World Championship, the silver and bronze medalist of the European Basketball Championships.

Daughter, Irina Fetisova, European champion in volleyball, four-time champion of Russia.

Andrey Fetisov was considered one of the most talented Russian basketball players of the 1990s. A serious knee injury prevented him from fully opening up – a fracture, a rupture of all ligaments. I had to do several operations, but it was not possible to recover one hundred percent.

Until the fifth grade, “Wick”, as his partners called him during his playing career, lived with his parents in Novokuznetsk, where he was engaged in diving and swimming. From where his family moved to Dushanbe (then the capital of the Tajik USSR), where young Andrei began to play basketball. And at the age of 16 he moved to the city on the Neva, where, as part of the famous Spartak, under the leadership of Kondrashin, in 1992 he managed to become the champion of the CIS. Two years later, the player was selected by the Milwaukee club in the NBA draft, but at that time he was already playing abroad, in the Spanish championship.

It was in Valladolid, the first foreign city in Fetisov’s career, that his daughter Irina was born, who in recent years has been playing in the Russian national volleyball team as a leading blocker.

Born into a sports family and being taller than her peers since childhood (now Irina’s height is 192 cm), Ira had to make a choice – basketball or volleyball. At first, the girl decided to follow her father’s path. In addition, Irina’s mother, Yulia Fetisova, also showed great promise in the game of Gullivers in her youth, but when she got married, she heard from her husband: “I need a wife, not an athlete.”

Since at the moment when the choice of a sport arose before the girl, the family already lived in Russia, Irina went to play basketball at the Kalinin sports school. But fate intervened – her coach emigrated to America.

Parents took their daughter from the section, but in order to direct the child’s energy somewhere, they gave it to volleyball. Successes came to the girl very quickly, already at the age of 15 she began to play for the backup team of the St. Petersburg club “Leningradka”.

This was followed by invitations to the Russian national teams of different ages, including the national one. And Fetisova became a top-level volleyball player already in the Moscow region – at first she played for the regional Zarechye-Odintsovo, and for the last eight years she has been playing for the Moscow Dynamo.

Irina still loves basketball, but only for men. And fans with experience who remember the game of Andrey Fetisov notice that her jump is exactly like dad’s.

Junior Champion

Stepanovs

Mother, Maria Stepanova, is a two-time Olympic bronze medalist in basketball, a two-time silver medalist of the World Championships, and a three-time European champion.

Son, Nikolai Zubov, is a player in the Russian youth volleyball team.

Maria Stepanova, who moved to the northern capital from the Stavropol Territory as a child, is considered by many to be the strongest European basketball player of the 21st century. In the Old World, for many years in a row she was recognized as the best according to the results of various international tournaments. And Maria is one of the few basketball players who knew how to perform a throw from above into the basket – a slam dunk.

However, Stepanova took place in life not only as a great athlete, but as a wife and mother. In 2013, she married water polo goalkeeper Denis Zubov, who, in order to be with his beloved more often, ended his career in big-time sports.

The first son in the family was Nikolai. Then Makar and Valeria were born. The younger ones have yet to make a choice in (or out of) sports, and Nikolay is already considered one of the rising stars of Russian volleyball. The guy plays for the youth team. And my mother, by the way, often travels with him to competitions, trying to support him from the stands.

“I still don’t understand volleyball,” Stepanova admits. – Of course, I know the rules, but I don’t understand many of the nuances. If Kolya went to basketball, he would peck at him. My husband understands volleyball better, sometimes he tells me. My son had problems with hearing since childhood, he plays with the device. Therefore, he also plays for the hearing-impaired team – they won the World Cup. For this, the title of master of sports of international class was awarded. They were supposed to perform at the Deaf Olympics, but for obvious reasons it didn’t work out. ”

Changed horses to dogs

Maya Semak, due to the profession of her stepfather Sergei Semak (now the head coach of FC Zenit), had to move often as a child. She changed eight schools in Moscow, Kazan, Tver and St. Petersburg. Nomadic life did not prevent Maya from playing sports professionally. Certainly not football.

At first, the girl was seriously passionate about equestrian sports. But then she turned her attention to the sled. True, not winter, but summer. Maya ran through the forests with a team of husky dogs, with a top speed of 18 km/h. She was a member of the Russian national team, became the vice-champion of Europe.

But I had to leave the big sport – in 2020, Maya became the mother of a wonderful girl.