Vsevolod Bobrov

Football

After serving in the Soviet Army during World War II, he was invited to play football for the Army club CSKA Moscow in 1945. That same year, he joined Dynamo Moscow on their 1945 tour of the United Kingdom; he scored 6 of the 19 their goals, and it was on this tour that he saw artificial ice for the first time. Playing until 1953 for CSKA, VVS, and Spartak, he would go on to win the Soviet Championship three times, scoring 97 goals in only 116 games. Bobrov led the country in goals in 1945 with 24 and 1947 with 14. Chronic knee problems led to him having surgeries in 1947, 1950, 1952, and 1953, to fix the issue, though it never was resolved. He was capped three times for the Soviet Union national team representing them in the 1952 Summer Olympics. He scored five goals in total, including a hat trick against Yugoslavia, though the Soviets lost that match and failed to medal. He was also part of the CDKA team that was disbanded by the government due to this loss, and transferred to Spartak Moscow for his final season of football.

Ice hockey

Bobrov began playing ice hockey for CSKA a year after his football start, in 1946. However, due to a knee injury sustained during the football season, he missed the first season. His playing career in this sport lasted until 1957, with the years between 1950 and 1953 spent with VVS. Although football was Bobrov's first sport, his success in ice hockey was even greater. In 1947–48, his first season of play, Bobrov…

Bobrov was born in Morshansk on 1 December 1922, not far from where Antonovshchina (Tambov Rebellion) took place. When he was about 2-3 years of age in 1925, his family moved to Sestroretsk near Leningrad. He first started to skate at the age of 5, and played bandy from a young age. He left school at the age of 13 to work in a factory. Other sources claim that he completed a standard post-secondary education, which included the seven year classical education and couple of years in a professional technical school (FZU) where he earned a certificate of the instrument assembly specialist, 4th Class. FZU was a system of educational institutions within factories. Soon after the start of the Operation Barbarossa, the factory where Bobrov worked was evacuated to Omsk. In Omsk, he graduated from the Red Army Quartermaster School in 1943.

Bobrov died in Moscow in 1979. He was posthumously inducted into the inaugural class of the IIHF Hall of Fame in 1997. For the greatest Russian athlete in the 20th century, Bobrov finished third behind football goalkeeper Lev Yashin and Greco-Roman wrestler Alexander Karelin. The Kontinental Hockey League, a Russian-based ice hockey league, has one of its four divisions named after Bobrov.