Russia (bbabo.net), - 95 years ago, Vladimir Kuts, one of the greatest runners in the history of world sports, was born.
At the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, he won two gold medals. But he became famous not only for this.
Those Games were almost perfect for the Soviet team. In the unofficial team standings, the Soviet Union took first place. Athletes from the USSR won 37 gold medals. And two of them - runner Vladimir Kuts in the races for 5 and 10 kilometers.
Surprisingly, during the Olympics, Kuts managed to get into a traffic accident. This is a fairly well-known story, many Olympians have told about it. But here, for example, is what Nikita Simonyan, who became the Olympic champion with the USSR national football team, recalls about those events:
- It seems that there was an open day in the Olympic village, many journalists came and Volodya asked one of them to drive a car. Driving in Australia is on the left. Closing the door, Kuts lost control and drove into a pole. There were no injuries. But the local press wrote that the Soviet runner had died in a car accident. At the same time, almost the next day, Kuts became an Olympic champion, and the journalist allegedly decided not to repair the car, but to put it near the house with a sign that the great champion Kuts crashed the car. And take a bribe for a photo nearby.
Shortly before the Olympics, Kuts was taken away by Briton Gordon Peary. But the Soviet runner managed to get ahead of him in Melbourne both in the five-kilometer race and in the "ten", when he applied the tactics of "ragged" running - constantly accelerating and slowing down the run. Piri later admitted that Kuts "killed" him with such a technique.
Shortly after the Olympics, Kuts, a front-line soldier and sailor of the Baltic Fleet, was forced to stop playing sports: his health let him down more often. He became a coach, raised several runners, wrote books.
But the life path of the great long-distance runner turned out to be too short. Kuts died when he was 48 years old. According to one of the widespread versions, Vladimir Petrovich decided to commit suicide by taking a large dose of sleeping pills.
Shortly before his departure, Kutz finished work on his latest book, Be the First.
bbabo.Net