Do you have professional sport in Soviet Union?
No, we don't. We regard sports as a means of education, of building up health, and not of making profits. In the USSR there are no professional athletes or professional athletic teams.
For a Soviet athlete sport is something that he devotes his free time to. All Soviet athletes hold regular jobs which provide them with the means of living. Here are a few examples.
Weightlifter Arkady Vorobyev, Doctor of Medicine, is a scientist. Rider Yelena Petushkova holds a Candidate's Degree in biology and lectures at Moscow University. Boxer Gennady Shatkov holds a Candidate's degree in law and is an Assistant Professor at Leningrad University. Chess player Mikhail Botvinnik holds the degree of Doctor of Technical Science and works at an energy-research institute.
Of course not all of our famous sportsmen work in the scientific field. Yuri Tyukalov, twice Olympic champion in rowing, is a graduate of the Leningrad Art College and it was he who made the metal embossings that decorate the lounge on the nuclear ice-breaker Arktika. Another Olympic champion, weightlifter Yuri Vlasov has become a writer. The famous speed skater Viktor Kosichkin is deputy chief of a department at the Interior Ministry. Football players Viktor Ponedelnik and Vladimir Maslachenko, and wrestler Alexander Ivanitsky are sports commentators.
All of them hold the title of Master of Sport and at different times were world and Olympic champions. But they were all successfully working or studying in their regular professions at the time they won their medals in sports contests.
How do the athletes manage to work, study and at the same time undergo intensive training and take part in contests? The answer is that the state is strongly committed to the development of sports. It allocates large sums to health protection, to the development of tourism and mass sports. The total membership of the country's sports clubs is 55 million. More and more coaches are being trained, and new stadiums, sports halls and swimming pools built. Athletes have the free use of gear and equipment. The clubs arrange athletes' trips to places where contests are held. The management of enterprises is interested in promoting physical training, and if they have a famous athlete on their staff who is also a good worker, they will give him extra leave to take part in contests even on working days. In this case the trade union makes up the lost wages.
Big sports events bring big profits to their sponsors. In the Soviet Union, however, the profits do not go into the pockets of managers who buy or sell athletes; they go to the sports clubs which use the money for the further advancement of physical training and sports for the masses, that is, for the construction of stadiums and for purchasing gear and equipment.