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Nothing lasts forever, not even the reign of hockey star Vladimir Putin, known worldwide as one of the great goalscorers of our generation. Putin, who is also the president of Russia, has cleaned up in an annual “Legends of Hockey” game for years, and the scouting report on him is simple: the dude can fill it up. He’s …
On a crisp November morning in Moscow, Steven Seagal found himself within the walls of the Grand Kremlin Palace, seated across from Vladimir Putin, the most powerful man in the Russian Federation. Dressed in a blood-red kimono and black trousers—a throwback to his days as a martial artist—Seagal observed the Russian…
Seeking to explain why Alex Ovechkin started the PutinTeam “social movement” earlier in the fall, a trio of Washington Post reporters went long on the Ovechkin-Putin bromance, and the genesis of Ovechkin’s PutinTeam launch. It’s a sprawling piece of work that explores both the origins and the effects of Ovechkin’s…
Washington Capitals superstar Alexander Ovechkin announced today via Instagram that he is creating a “social movement” called “Putin Team,” which he says is meant to unite Russia and support its current president, Vladimir Putin.
Diego Maradona was in Russia this past weekend to present the trophy at the Confederations Cup final. Predictably, the media posed a battery of questions to him about the world’s current geopolitical landscape. Here are some of his answers.
Russian President Vladimir Putin sometimes entertains himself by getting decked out in hockey gear and forcing other people to skate around him and pretend to play defense while he scores a bunch of goals. He did that in Sochi today, but before taking the ice he was confronted by a CBS reporter who asked him about…
The sports world is replete with notably wacky commissioners and leaders, and for all the wild shit that the Sepp Blatters and Oleg Tinkovs of the world get up to, the World Chess Federation’s president probably has them all beat. Kirsan Ilyumzhinov has been the top dog at FIDE since 1995, and for most of that time he…
It begins with the cyclists, of course. Just before the 1998 Tour de France, a Belgian trainer named Willy Voet was arrested while crossing the border into France because his car was filled with a tremendous amount of performance-enhancing drugs. The subsequent investigation (which became known as the Festina Affair)…
United States intelligence agencies believe that Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered the hacking of the Democratic National Committee in part because he believed the doping scandal that led to hundreds of Russian athletes missing the 2016 Summer Olympics was an American operation, according to a newly…
In a brief battle over exactly how much Donald Trump loves Vladimir Putin (is it just a lot or more than he loves his own children?), Trump offered the most infantile, absolutely incredible retort of his campaign thus far. Specifically, Trump went with the tried and true, “I know you are, but what am I?”
Since FIFA president Sepp Blatter won his first election in 1998, he has (allegedly! [lol]) both bribed and received bribes in order to stay in power and award desperate countries international tournaments. Along the way, he has actually and truly ravaged local economies by siphoning public money for useless…
[Alex Ovechkin is congratulated by Vladimir Putin after Russia beat Finland to win Worlds. More photos at Russian Machine Never Breaks.]
Vladimir Putin took part in a hockey game at the Night Hockey League festival in Sochi, though the competition appeared to be rather weak.
At last! We're finally on the cusp of the Sochi Olympics. It's a time to focus on all the extraneous inconveniences, both small and great, that, for better or worse, will be forgotten as as soon as the real action starts. But before we fully lose ourselves in a world of ice dancing and curling, we should take a minute…
Good news, gays and lesbians planning to go to the Sochi Olympics! Russian President Vladimir Putin says you won't be arrested and thrown into prison as long as you keep your gay away from the children.
Russia has a problem: Gay people exist. They're ghastly and gross and bad, and they could destroy the traditional family and rip apart the very fabric of the nation. Even the idea of homosexuality represents a danger to the country, which is why this summer, Vladimir Putin signed wide-sweeping anti-gay and anti-gay…
Russia wiped the floor with the competition at the World University Games, garnering 292 medals—with 155 of them being gold—at the 12-day competition. People complained that Russia brought in Olympians at an event for students, to which president Vladimir Putin says: Play some sports or pop some boners, haters.
Yesterday, we wrote about how Russian president Vladimir Putin Deboed Patriots owner Bob Kraft for one of his Super Bowl rings. The story felt too good to be true, which means it might be too good to be true. Kraft's recount of the exchange and Putin's quote, for example, approaches something resembling implausibility: