To Russia With Love

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"O.K. Like me."

WHETHER THEY'RE fanatics, patriots, fools or some combination of the three, sports sugar daddies like Kalmanovic have surfaced all over Mother Russia. Virtually every prominent sport and prestigious club team has a patron—if not one of the oligarchs (the well-connected, early-moving businessmen who became billionaires after the collapse of the Soviet Union), then some arriviste multimillionaire minigarch or well-placed politician with the influence to flush out cash. "Russians by nature are a people intrigued by the idea of power," says David Blatt, the American-Israeli coach of Dynamo Moscow and the Russian national men's team, who in 2007 delivered Russia's first title since Soviet days at Eurobasket, the biennial competition among European national teams. "It's culturally ingrained—whether fear of power or enjoyment in having it. These guys use sports to amuse themselves and further their own interests. Russia is steeped in the tradition of sports, and they combine that passion with money."

Today Russian businessmen no longer merely vie with one another to see who can win domestic titles in soccer, basketball and hockey. They've also taken their competitiveness to the world stage, where they own several of the most storied soccer clubs in the English Premier League, including Chelsea (the pride of oligarch Roman Abramovich) and Arsenal (in which metals, lumber and media mogul Alisher Usmanov holds a 24% stake). Last spring Abramovich's Avangard Omsk, a hockey club in an oil town on the Siberian plain, lured New York Rangers captain Jaromir Jagr from the NHL with a tax-free $14 million over two years. ( Omsk is the flagship of the fledgling Kontinental hockey league, commonly referred to as the KHL, which extends to Belarus, Latvia and Kazakhstan, and whose president, Alexander Medvedev, heads the export division of Gazprom, the state-controlled energy giant.) Oligarchs' support also helps account for the recent head-turning results of Russian national and club teams: in basketball, besides that Eurobasket title, a Euroleague men's championship for CSKA Moscow in 2008; in ice hockey, a world title, Russia's first in nearly two decades, last spring; in soccer, UEFA Cup crowns for CSKA Moscow in 2005 and Zenit St. Petersburg this year, as well as a semifinal appearance for the national team in June's Euro 2008.

Russia was a surprising disappointment at the Beijing Olympics, where it barely beat out Great Britain for third in the gold medal count—but within weeks came word that the 15 oligarchs who compose the Russian Olympians Foundation would increase to $40 million a year their spending on more and better coaches, training stipends and incentive bonuses for athletes. "It's unclear whether we can make an impact [at the 2010 Winter Games] in Vancouver," says foundation executive director Alexander Katushev. "But I'm sure we can make one by London [in 2012], and we'll have a lot to say about Sochi in 2014 [page 65]. The fact that [Russian] president [Dmitri] Medvedev is chairman of our board gives me grounds to say, 'This will work.'"

The global financial crisis has pared the oligarchs' wealth, and the plunging price of oil is slowing the flow of cash into the Russian economy in general. But sports haven't been substantially affected yet. "They should be, because as the market suffers, people aren't able to buy as many tickets and sponsors' products," says Dmitri Navosha, who blogs about sports business on his site sports.ru. "But in Russia few people look at sports as a real business. In the States, if the NHL weren't making money, they'd close the league. But since Soviet times [influential] people here have supported sports mostly for political reasons."

The Russian press recently carried a picture of Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the Russian Volleyball Federation, turned out in Karch Kiraly sunglasses and a backward cap—an odd getup for someone who runs the FSB, the state security bureau that's one of the successors to the KGB. "Patrushev attracts money," Navosha says. "He loves volleyball, and there's lots of volleyball on the government sports channel—not because of ratings, but because of Patrushev. Otherwise, go down the Forbes list [of richest Russians], and almost everybody is involved in sports. It's not all soccer, basketball and hockey—there are Olympic sports too."

Shortly before the financial meltdown, the 6'7" billionaire and pickup hoops fanatic Mikhail Prokhorov sold his stake in Norilsk Nickel to fellow oligarch Oleg Deripaska for about $10 billion ($6.5 billion in cash and the rest in stock), which means that Prokhorov's twin passions—the CSKA Moscow men's basketball team, on whose directorate he has served, and the astonishingly popular TV sport of biathlon (the race combining cross-country skiing and riflery, and nicknamed the Russian Formula One)—won't lack for support anytime soon.

When Kobe Bryant and LeBron James mused last summer about jumping to Europe after their NBA contracts expire—"$40 million a year, and I'm there," Bryant jokingly told a Russian reporter in Beijing—Prokhorov's name made every short list of European basketball figures who could produce the requisite cash. Even if Bryant and James remain safely Stateside, though, Russian businessmen are likely to continue altering the contours of worldwide competition with the kind of wealth and commitment that led Taurasi, upon hearing someone mention Kalmanovic in Beijing, to exclaim, "I'd take a bullet for that man!" Whereupon she clutched at her heart and went into a mock death spiral.

TO FULLY grasp the mixture of nationalism, wealth and political influence currently remaking Russian sports, it's necessary to revisit the early 1990s and the collapse of the Soviet Union. With no regime to regulate the oil, gas, timber, coal and precious metals scattered across the 11 time zones of the world's largest country, oligarchs-to-be acquired stakes in Russia's extractive industries for a fraction of their worth. Today 22 men reportedly control some 40% of the country's gross domestic product, and in virtually every case their wealth can be traced to footholds seized during the chaos.