Athlete profile: Valerij Stoljarov

Posted: Tue February 3, 1998 at 5:00 PM ET

Athlete notes

Stoljarov has a no fear, go-for-broke attitude in sports as in life...though he does not speak much English, he is the kind of guy who has no problem coming up to you and saying, "Hello, my name is Valerij Stoljarov"...last year, when the Russian ski jumping team needed a fourth jumper for the team competition at the World Championships in Trondheim, Norway, Stoljarov stepped right up to the plate and offered his services...not only that, but in an age of increasing specialization in sports, Stoljarov still managed to tally the two best jumps on the team -- quite an impressive feat...and as for Nagano, Stoljarov seems to be equally up-front about his and his team's chances in the nordic combined competition..."They are ‘big,'" he says...that is a bold statement, considering the team's youth...in fact, just two years ago, Russian nordic combined skiers did not record a single point on the World Cup circuit, nor did they have any athletes place at the 1995 World Championships...the young Stoljarov has since burst onto the scene...having grown up in the vicinity of cold St. Petersburg in the days when it was called Leningrad, Stoljarov joined a ski club which supported nordic combined skiers when he was very young...his first memory of nordic skiing was in 1978, when he strapped on skis at just __ years of age...and though the Soviet Union won two successive medals in 1960 and 1964 in the individual Events, they have not become a modern-day nordic combined powerhouse, winning only one medal since -- Aller Levandi's bronze at the 1988 Calgary Games...Stoljarov hopes to change that in Japan..."The jumps are very good," he says while assessing the Hakuba venue. "I was luckier on them last year, so I like them. The cross-country track is pretty complicated, pretty difficult"...after a solid World Cup season, which left Stoljarov ninth in the year-end standings, he has kept up his hard summer training regimen..."I did not change a thing this summer," he says. "It was training as usual!"...for the young Russian, that program means spending little time at home and most of his life on the road..."We do some training in Russia," he says, "but it is mostly traveling from ski area to ski area in Europe and then competing in the world competitions. It's OK."...Valerij is an only child...his father is a driver and his mother is a housewife...he does not speak English....