Sports journalist and TV presenter Vasily Utkin has died. Obituary

At the age of 53, Vasily Utkin died, presumably due to thromboembolism. Having learned about this, many colleagues posthumously, without much hesitation, awarded him the title of the country’s best sports commentator in its entire post-Soviet history. However, the word “best” in this case, apparently, is still an unjustified simplification of Utkin’s talent, which was too special to fit into standard hierarchies.

In the last decade and a half, Vasily Utkin has tried himself in different guises – he hosted entertainment programs on television and socio-political programs on the radio, played in theater and cinema (his Igor Tsaplin from “Election Day” is one of the most memorable characters on the domestic screen in the 2000s) , led the Egrisi club from the football media league. But, whatever one may say, in the memories of most of those who were shocked by his death, he forever remained primarily a sports commentator. Well, or you can even narrow it down a little – a football commentator.

Vasily Utkin appeared on NTV in 1994 as a young guy in his early 20s. Without a background, which in Soviet times presupposed rapid advancement in what eventually became his main profession, he is not an athlete, not a professional television journalist, but a philologist.

But the times were no longer Soviet, and new television required new people and new approaches. And with Utkin it was an amazing hit.

A few years later, the trend among fans was already to discuss not only, and sometimes not so much, the details of important football matches, but also his commentary on them. It was surprisingly unusual for the generation that grew up in the USSR, accustomed to restraint and caution. Utkin made a performance out of the story about the match. He decorated it with Brodsky’s poems, casually played with surnames and first names (“Jurado came out, he will become more rude”), came up with metaphors (“Pressed against the bar as if he were a beloved woman”), invented terms like “deprived” and even took purely theatrical pauses for half a minute. It was something like a revolution.

At the same time, his “Football Club” turned into the main program about the main game, and around the huge – in an absolutely literal sense – figure of Vasily Utkin, a whole squad of other, either young, or not so young, but also commentators who came “from outside” arose, completely destroying worship in front of what now looks like very simple and uninteresting Soviet standards.

However, it is still impossible to state that Vasily Utkin created his own standard, despite a decent number of sports television journalists who consider him their teacher. Many people notice his influence, but for some reason, in their performance, “obesmyalil” sounds like a banal cliche, playing with surnames sounds like a harmful trick, and sudden pauses are perceived as nothing more than a sign of poor preparation for a report.

Vasily Utkin’s path, as it turned out, was too special to try to copy.

It also turned out that with all the abundance of truly cool football commentators who turned into frontmen after his formal leadership ended, the demand for Utkin still remained great. To understand this, it was enough to read thousands of remarks under messages about his death on various Internet resources – in them nostalgia for his distant youth, which passed to the accompaniment of his baritone and the victory of Oleg Romantsev’s Spartak over Real and Arsenal, was mixed with regret that after leaving Match TV in 2016, he worked little in his key role. Vasily Utkin was terribly missed at football.

And now it will always be missed.

Alexey Dospehov