I chose Ovechkin as the best athlete in the history of Russia. I don’t understand how it could be otherwise

Recognition of Alexei Belov – the boss of hockey on Sports.ru.

It seems that this is my third rating in which Ovechkin participates. There may have been others, but these are the ones I remember well.

One was quite recently, last year – we collected the top 50 hockey players in our history . Well, more precisely, I collected Nikita Petukhov as the main producer and performer of this story with minimal rearrangements. That is, only he could prevent Ovechkin from taking first place, but he did not. And this did not even cause any mass anger in the comments (and the hockey public usually knows how to find something to be outraged about).

And the other – in 2017, and then there was a vote of the hockey gang for the best player of the XXI century . Then 5 out of 6 people put Crosby in first place, three out of six did not even put Ovechkin in second place, and one of them did not include it in the top ten at all. It was just the case when someone else’s opinion causes quite real irritation, but this must be dealt with somehow.

I experienced approximately the same feelings when I saw this phrase : “Alexander Ovechkin confidently won in the editorial vote in terms of the number of first places (25 out of 48), but his final advantage over Maria Sharapova does not look overwhelming – 4647 points against 4429. It’s all about the fact that Maria was more often chosen in the top ten, and Alexander was ignored in some questionnaires.

Ovechkin they ignored. It’s okay, although, as it were, well … ##### yourself! And these are not some kind of aliens, these are people with whom we work together, with someone, even, perhaps, for many years.

You may be surprised, but this only proves that Ovechkin should be in the first place, and nothing else. Demonstrative rejection occurs only in the address of truly great athletes. Ovechkin is at the height of his hype right now, Gretzky’s record race is in full swing, and of course there are people he annoys, that’s fine. Sharapova, by the way, while she was playing, also had a lot of haters – well, like an American and generally unworthy of the left heel of Serena Williams, in that spirit. But time leaves only the truly important in history.