By Walter Mayr
He doesn't get a chance to drink his coffee and smoke a cigarette in peace, and explain the making of the miracle of Kiev. Oleg Blokhin has become a magnet for flashbulbs.
Inside the Sports Bar on Kiev's Chmelnitski Street, souvenir hunters armed with cameras converge from all sides on this folk hero. Seeming neither visibly irritated nor flattered, Blokhin stands up, poses without comment, and sits down again. He takes adulation in his stride.
Blokhin is now 53. No longer constrained by the straitjacket of being a Soviet coach, he has changed a bit. Around the eyes - and around the waist. But the penetrating gaze and razor-sharp crew cut still recall the Red Scare: the Cold War-era cop in shorts who spread shock and awe in the West with his pure athletic talent.
Oleg Blokhin may well be the greatest footballer ever to emerge from the Soviet Union. He appeared 101 times in the Soviet jersey with the Cyrillic characters "CCCP" emblazoned across the chest; in 1975 he was named European Footballer of the Year by France Football. As first violin in the so-called Red Orchestra, he led his club Dynamo Kiev to victory in two European finals and the UEFA Super Cup.
For Ukrainians born after his heyday, a video clip has been running on national TV since last autumn. It features Blokhin dancing past 1974 West German World Cup winners Georg Schwarzenbeck, Franz Beckenbauer and Sepp Maier in quick succession during the 1975 Super Cup final against Bayern Munich before tapping the ball over the line. In living rooms from Kiev to Donetsk, the stunned German commentator exclaims, "That was world class!"
For older Ukrainians who remember the great Blokhin as the wunderkind of Soviet soccer, the hero appears in a new role at the end of the clip: as Ukraine's coach, 30 years on, celebrating the country's qualification for the 2006 World Cup to the soundtrack of the new national anthem, a soccer anthem.
"There was once a great country," so the song goes, "that loved Blokhin, Blokhin." But because that great country has fallen part, a new nation needs "another team like that again." And Blokhin has been chosen to launch a repeat performance. The rousing chorus, which he is sometimes compelled to intone in public, urges: "Come on, lads, bottoms up. Let's all toast Blokhin."
Blokhin shrugs off his metamorphosis from the old system's star pupil to the pride of the new Ukraine as a quirk of fate. "Every era has its good aspects," he says, sipping his cold coffee. Adding that even in the Soviet era, he had everything he could wish for. "When I was 20 I used to drive a white Volga. That was really something then. I always got the girls I wanted."
His current fame reflects on the Ukraine, which isn't bad in and of itself. But Blokhin's main interest is success and his personal role in achieving it. "When I was coaching in Greece 10 years ago, people still thought Ukraine was somewhere in Siberia. Those days are over," he says with a satisfied grin. After the draw for the World Cup finals in Leipzig, Jürgen Klinsmann went up to Blokhin and said: "Thank God we didn't get you guys."
Footballing respect bolsters the self-respect of a country trying to reinvent itself after centuries under Russian and - in its westerly areas - Austrian rule. When Dnipro's Ruslan Rotan scores the winner against Georgia on September 3, 2005, making Ukraine the first European qualifiers for the World Cup, the event is celebrated between the Carpathians and the Black Sea like an act of national liberation.
The Ukrainian football nurseries of Kiev, Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk had already supplied the nucleus of the USSR teams - 14 members of the 22-man Soviet squad at Mexico '86; 10 of the team in Italy in 1990. Following independence, when Ukraine is excluded from qualifications for the 1994 World Cup, some desert the flag and six join the Russian squad, among them tournament top scorer Oleg Salenko. In the next eight years, Ukraine twice fails to reach football's greatest event.
Blokhin is the solution, people say in Kiev. The man with the Midas touch, the only man capable of changing the country's fortunes. They even wonder why their idol hasn't returned earlier from his self-imposed exile on the sidelines.
Into his late 30s, Blokhin is still journeying from town to town for Austrian second-division team Vorwärts Steyr, earning foreign - hard - currency. Next, as a coach in Greece, he wins a single trophy in three years. "He wouldn't have lasted long at Dynamo with that record," they scoff back home. And when the country's favorite son finally returns in 1997, guards prevent him from entering the stadium that hosted his greatest triumphs.
The incident makes headlines. "Blokhin will only enter this stadium again over my dead body," a Kiev editor quotes Dynamo's president Grigori Surkis, one of the billionaire tycoons in President Kuchma's inner circle, as saying.
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