http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/23/sp...t-62.html?_r=0
By JEFF Z. KLEINAPRIL 22, 2012
Valeri Vasiliev, the rugged top defenseman with the great Soviet hockey teams of the 1970s and ’80s, who won Olympic gold medals and watched another slip away in stunning fashion to the United States in 1980, died on Thursday in Moscow. He was 62.
The cause was heart failure, kidney failure and pneumonia, his wife, Tatania, told the Russian daily Sovetsky Sport. Vasiliev had once kept playing after having what was later determined to be a heart attack.
Vasiliev was a mainstay of the Soviet national team when it won Olympic gold medals in 1972 and ’76 and eight International Ice Hockey Federation World Championships from 1970 to ’82.
In the later years of his career, Vasiliev was the Soviets’ captain, and he accepted the Canada Cup in 1981 after an upset 8-1 victory in the tournament final in Montreal, where he helped shackle a Team Canada lineup that included Wayne Gretzky, Mike Bossy and Guy Lafleur.
Along with all the victories, Vasiliev was also in two famous games the Soviets lost — Game 8 of the 1972 Summit Series against Team Canada, and the 1980 Olympic medal-round game against the United States, which came to be known as the Miracle on Ice.
The 1980 Soviet team, competing in Lake Placid, N.Y., was considered invincible.
“We were already celebrating,” Vasiliev told The New York Times in 2005, ruefully recalling the Soviets’ overconfidence. The American collegians rallied in the third period to win, 4-3, shocking the Soviets.
Vasiliev grew up in a tough neighborhood in Gorky, as Nizhny Novgorod was called during the Soviet era, and played with that city’s main club, Torpedo. But at 18, he was acquired by Dynamo Moscow, and went on to play in the Soviet domestic league for the next 17 seasons. His 619 league games are still a domestic record in Russia.
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Valeri Vasiliev was a mainstay of the Soviet national team when it won Olympic gold medals in 1972 and ’76 and eight International Ice Hockey Federation World Championships between 1970 and ’82. Credit United Press International
He was known as a strong, rugged, stay-at-home defenseman at a time when Soviet hockey stressed finesse, creativity and continual attack. He was tough in other ways as well.
Vasiliev endured chest pains while helping the Soviets win the 1978 world championships in Prague but did not tell anyone. When he returned to Moscow, he had a cardiogram. “Yes, you have had a heart attack,” the doctors told him, he recalled in a 2009 interview with Sovetsky Sport.
He was named the best defenseman at three world championships. But he never won a Soviet domestic title with Dynamo Moscow. In those years, the league was dominated by CSKA Moscow.
Valeri Ivanovich Vasiliev was born in Volkhov, Russia, on Aug. 3, 1949. Besides his wife, he is survived by two daughters, Elena Zhamnova and Ekaterina Vasilieva, and six grandchildren.
Vasiliev was on the ice and partly at fault for allowing what is generally regarded as one of the most famous goals in hockey history, scored by Paul Henderson on Sept. 28, 1972, in Moscow.
That goal, with 34 seconds remaining in Game 8 of the Summit Series between Team Canada and the Soviet national team coached by Vsevolod Bobrov, gave the Canadians a 6-5 victory and the series. It was the first confrontation between Canadian N.H.L. professionals and the best in European hockey.
“That goal is etched in my memory, probably forever,” Vasiliev said. “I hesitated for a moment, the puck jumped off the blade of my stick, and the Canadians immediately stuffed it into the goal. In the dressing room afterward, Bobrov said nothing to me. I wanted to die.”
But soon after, Vasiliev remembered, Bobrov came up to him during a training session and lifted his spirits.
“Don’t doubt yourself,” Bobrov told Vasiliev. “Know that you’re a player on our most important hockey team, and that you deserve to be here.”