President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia congratulated the hockey player Alex Ovechkin on Monday for having broken the NHL goal record.
Mr. Ovechkin, 39, Captain of Washington Capitals, scored his 895th career goal on Sunday afternoon in a match against the New York Islanders. This broke a record of Wayne Gretzky which lasted 26 years.
In a statement on Monday, Mr. Putin congratulated Mr. Ovechkin, who began as a professional hockey player in Moscow, for the “capital realization” he called “A real cause of celebration for fans in Russia and beyond.”
The sporting feat – and the comments of the Kremlin – highlighted the support of Mr. Ovechkin to Mr. Putin and the position of the hockey star on the war in Ukraine.
Ovechkin, who has played for Washington’s capital since 2005, has lived in the United States in the past two decades. But his Instagram profile photo shows it with Mr. Putin, and in 2017, he launched a social media movement called #putinat, months before the Russia elections.
The hockey star also raised the eyebrows in 2022 when he did not issue a pure and simple condemnation of the large -scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Asked about it at a press conference, Mr. Ovechkin said: “Please no more war.” In response to a question of knowing if he has always argued Mr. Putin, Mr. Ovechkin said: “He is my president”, but added: “I am not in politics. I am athlete.”
In his post -match remarks on Sunday, Mr. Ovechkin celebrated the realization with a wave of gratitude for his colleagues players – and said: “Russia, we did it!”
On Monday, Russian state television celebrated the athlete as “our pride, a Russian hockey player who made history”, drawing “admiration on both sides of the Atlantic”.
Pro-Putin experts quickly seized Mr. Ovechkin’s achievements after the record goal.
“Ovechkin has shown several times that he was not afraid and was not ashamed to be Russian, even when the Russians were victims of intimidation to be Russian,” wrote Sergei Markov, political scientist with links with Kremlin, on social networks. “This is another thing for which everyone in Russia is grateful to Ovechkin, as well as the respect he has won in the world – not only for hockey.”
Ovechkin has not contributed to Russia internationally since 2019, and the Russian national team has been prohibited from world competitions by the International Ice Hockey Federation since the Ukraine’s large -scale invasion.
War was a controversial question in international sports, Russian athletes undergoing pressure to condemn the war.
