Oleg Znarok is a Soviet and Latvian hockey player. Master of Sports and Honored Trainer of Russia. For a long time he headed one of the strongest KHL teams in St. Petersburg SKA and the Russian national hockey team.
Biography
On January 2, 1963, Oleg Valerievich Znarok was born in the city of Ust-Katav. The father of the future hockey player was an athlete, a locally respected football coach. That is why from an early age the boy went in for sports. My father also worked in the hockey section. From the age of three, he began to teach his son to skate. Perhaps this played a decisive role in choosing the profession of a hockey player.
Career
The official start of Oleg Znark’s professional hockey career is his debut for Chelyabinsk Tractor, in which he successfully played for four years. After a bright career start, enshrined in successful games for all four years, a talented player was noticed in the main club of the country “CSKA”. Znarok was extremely happy with such attention and was ready to move to the capital's club immediately. However, his father dissuaded him.
One of the reasons for moving from Tractor to Dynamo Riga is a big conflict with veterans of the Chelyabinsk club, after which disqualification followed. After moving to Riga, Znarok joined the local Dynamo, in which he spent most of his playing career. In 1992, Oleg Znarok moved to the United States, where he played one season in the AHL domestic championship for the Man Meriners team. Then followed a series of foreign clubs, he managed to play in Germany and the Czech Republic. In 2002, he completed his career as a player.
Since 2006 he made his debut as a head coach, led the national team of Latvia. For 5 years spent in the national team, he did not achieve particularly outstanding results. The maximum height that he took with the Latvian team - in 2009, at the World Championships, the team reached the quarter-finals.
Russian team
Since 2014, he led the Russian team. In the same year, after a shameful performance by the national team at the Sochi Olympics, the national team led by Znark won the world championship. Further, the results went downhill. The following year, the Russian team was only able to reach the finals, where it suffered a devastating defeat from the principal rivals of the Canadian team 1-6.
In 2016 and 2017, the national team of Russia was content with only bronze medals. In the coaching career, there was another “exotic” team - “Olympic athletes from Russia”, formally this is the same team, but because of doping scandals, athletes from Russia were banned from playing under the national flag. Oleg Znarok led this team to the coveted Olympic gold, which the team from Russia did not win for 26 years.
