As we jumped for joy and celebrated our victory in Ljubljana, little did we know that Belarus team will never be assembled according to its current 1994 roster ever again. That is the saddest part of modern team sports in general, and basketball in particular. We were young and when you young you don't think about things like this ... Not that thinking would help or change the flow of events that soon followed.
It turns out that there were some US College coaches among the fans in Slovenia and they had the eyes on our team. Their names were Mike Jarvis and Scott Beeten. As the story goes, Alexander Koul and Andrei Sviridov - the two 7' footers (2m10cm) - were the first to safely depart to the U.S. soil and join The George Washington Colonials for the 1994/95 season. Andrei Krivonos and I had followed that path a year later, after winning yet another Belarus Championship title in 1995.A few days after European Championship, Oleg Yushkin and Gennadi Kuznecov traveled to Ukraine and found their happiness on the Black Sea coast in Odessa. The tourney MVP Ruslan Boidakov, who was rumored to have an offer from Barcelona, had signed with Aquarius (Volgograd) in Russia. Dmitri Kuzmin and Alexei Pintikov went on to play in Russia as well and had quite successful careers out there.
Alexei Olshevsky had moved over the Belarus western boarder to Poland and enjoys living there to this day. The two Alexanders, Rodionov and Lobazevich, eventually found themselves in France. Our head coaches - Alexander Borisov and Michael Taitz - had stayed in Belarus for some time; however, Micheal Taitz eventually moved to Israel where he passed away on New Years day of 2007 at the age of 77.
Nevertheless, before we arrived to Belarus from Slovenian capital, there was something that could have had a totally drastic effect on the outcome of the Championship trip. As mentioned in the earlier posts, our team was always traveling Europe by bus and this trip was no exception. It takes almost two days to cover the roads from Ljubljana to Minsk. The first day went by pretty fast as all of us were happily taking pictures of fellow teammates, gold medals and The Championship trophy itself.
It was an early morning of a sunny July summer day as the bus was doing its best and rolling through the roads of Poland. We should have been arriving home by afternoon. Suddenly, there was a strange abrupt noise that woke everyone up and the bus jumped, dipped and had to stop. After a quick inspection, the bus drivers said that the right front wheel had been barely hanging on the 3 remaining bolts - the other 5 were lost along the way...
Needless to say how everyone felt - it was a mix of early morning sleepiness and a feeling that a tragedy was about to happen. We swiftly unloaded the bus and accommodated ourselves between the forest and the road looking for the ways to get warm - 6 o'clock morning sun was not much of a help. Some of us laid on the ground along the road while others went into the forest to start a little fire and maybe even make up some sort of breakfast. As for me, I was laying near Andrei Sviridov and trying to fall asleep - when I heard a police car slamming the breaks right 20 feet away from us!
Then everything was developing like a bad novel - the cops came out of the car and were running towards us and soon we found ourselves at gunpoint! We hear the usual "Hands Up!" though we didn't exactly understood Polish, the reality was surreal - both Andrei and I were thinking it was a bad dream. To make the matters worse, the sun was in our eyes and Andrei made a few unintentional steps towards the cops. They were some short cops and when the Belarus giant was in front of them that policeman's finger was holding the trigger so tight. Never in my life did I found myself at gunpoint, but I certainly was not thinking it would happen a day after winning European Championship.
As we find out later, the local police headquarters were notified by the bypassing Polish drivers that the Russian racketeering gang was camping alongside the road! It was rough times - first years after the Soviet Union collapsed - as many trouble-makers were making their cash by racketeering the bypassing tracks and passenger vehicles on the road Berlin - Minsk - Moscow. The Polish police quickly realized that it made a mistake, however, they took one member of our delegation to police headquarters and fined him $10 for starting a fire camp in the forest, which is illegal in Poland.
Finally, we made it home and embraced our families. If one would think that the local media paid undivided attention to our victory and made us Nation's heroes, that was not the case. The life of Belarus population was not centered around sports at all, and to this day not many know that we are the one and only Belarus team in any team sports to win a European Championship.
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