Another young prospect, Igor Yazmikin, was banned for life for ignoring repeated warnings from Soviet authorities about alcohol consumption. Belosheikin was suspended for three games last season because of excessive drinking.
Neither have such successors as Evgeny Belosheikin and Sergei Mylnikov. Vladimir Myshkin, who replaced Tretiak during the Miracle on Ice game in 1980 at Lake Placid and allowed the final two U.S. team scored, the Soviet players laughingly pointed at the Soviet goalie and cried, “Myshkin, Myshkin.” In Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, in 1984, two Soviet players were fooling around with a table hockey game that matched Team USA against the Soviets. The Soviets have yet to find an adequate replacement for Vladislav Tretiak, who from 1969 to 1984 was the starting goaltender on the national team and the most feared masked man of his time. But there are factors suggesting that Team CCCP is encountering some rough skating: The Canadian team won the world junior title, too, also in Moscow. Then, in December, playing on their home ice, they lost their own tournament, the Izvestia Cup in Moscow, to the Canadian national team that will be skating in the Olympics. Last fall, they lost the Canada Cup for the second straight time to a team of National Hockey League all-stars. That’s not the only defeat the Soviets have absorbed lately.
Sweden had gone 0-48-1 against the Soviets until winning in Stockholm last year. The Swedes are top-seeded, by virtue of their beating out the Soviets in the World Championships last year.
When the Soviets take the ice this weekend in Calgary, they won’t even rank as favorites to win their seventh gold medal in nine tries since their first Olympic appearance in 1956.
The world might not have caught up with the Soviet Union yet, but you can bet a garage full of Zambonis that the gap is closing. They still are hockey’s Big Red Machine, but if some team other than the comrades with the CCCP’s on their sweaters winds up with the gold medal in Calgary, it will rank as something less than a miracle.