2024-08-21 20:15:29
Valery Voronin is an outstanding midfielder on the field and an unrivaled charmer in life, but fame and alcohol push him into the abyss
Beauty and charm are their two most powerful weapons. It is a matter of beans for them to concentrate in a moment or two as much charm in their gaze as mere mortal men cannot achieve in a lifetime. Hundreds of women pass through their arms, and even their biggest rivals fail to hate them. Their charm puts them at a table with kings and queens, and the crowd applauds their successes and instantly forgives their failures.
And despite all this adoration, fame and opportunities, two of the most exclusive representatives of the stronger sex at the end of their days are lonely and disillusioned with the reality around them. Of Alain Delon’s demons we all knew, or learned, after death finally responded to his insistent invitations to visit him. But there are few who are familiar with the life and being of Valery Voronin, who many decades ago was declared the Alain Delon of Soviet football.
The midfielder of “Torpedo” (Moscow) creates real heroics on the field and gains huge popularity not only in his homeland, but also in the whole of Europe. However, great fame does not come only because of his football qualities. Voronin is a handsome man with extraordinary charm, with who easily conquers and devastates women’s hearts and at the same time attracts the sympathies of the most hardened ultras of the enemy. Even the British Queen Elizabeth II, devoid of excessive emotion, declared him the most elegant footballer and presented him with a porcelain service after the end of the World Cup in England in 1966
To get to his meeting with the Queen, Valery Voronin (born 1939) walks a perfectly paved path. His parents are relatively wealthy people, and his father runs a bookstore in a Moscow suburb, and his work obliges him to come into contact with writers and other representatives of the cultural elite of the time. During these meetings, the little kid not only hangs at the feet of the adults, but also listens in on their conversations. So, without being pressured, Voronin began reading poetry, listening to classical music, and writing and reading in English. But instead of succeeding his father in the bookstore, he goes to the field and turns out to be very good there too.
The youngster very quickly became a favorite of the old dogs in the dressing room, not only because of the heart of the game, but also because of the rich common culture, which, then and now, is a very rare phenomenon in football circles. Valery Voronin starts winning matches, finals, medals and cups. At the same time, it has also achieved great success on the gentle front. It gets to the point that the management of “Dynamo” (Moscow) reminds him that it’s high time he got a wife and at least two children in order to cement his image as the almost perfect hero of the Soviet system. His superiors are so insistent not only for ideological reasons, but also for purely practical reasons.They hope that a large and exemplary family will weigh like a concrete trough around the talented legs of the already popular player and knock out of his head any plans to escape to the West.
However, Voronin does not dream of a loving wife, but of a passionate affair with Sophia Loren. In the mid-1960s, he was already a football star and an international-class handsome man. His life is football, parties and adventures with the most current beauties of the Soviet show business. The popular football player is so cocky in his relationships with women that he decided to offer his heart to Sophia Loren herself, whom he fell in love with unconditionally according to his own confessions to teammates in the locker room.
“Valery was an exceptional conte, but he did not irritate with his self-confidence. On the contrary, everyone loved him for his smile and his desire to touch the stars. He assured us that sooner or later he would end up in the same bedroom as Sophia Loren. He believed that it was enough just to stand in front of her eyes and the job would be done”, his teammate in the Moscow “Torpedo” will later remember.
The star of the team has no reason to doubt his own abilities. At the time, he drove a black Volga, drank expensive Western cognac and hung out with people like Adidas founder Adolf Dassler. In Europe, his footballing qualities are well known, and the emissaries of Real Madrid and Inter are ready to park. several cartloads of gold in Red Square to get the talented midfielder in return.
On top of that, fate decides to help and sends the Soviet football player and Sophia Loren to the same international airport. Voronin needs no prompting and in his typical unceremonious style tries to win the attention of the Italian cinema icon, but is stopped by her bodyguard. The Russian man born under a lucky star gets a second chance after the actress arrives at the Moscow Film Festival to receive an award for her role in the film “Marriage in Italian”. To date, two versions of what happened after that have reached. According to the first, the football star through his friends, he manages to invite the beautiful Italian woman to the most chic Moscow bar, but she never comes to the meeting. According to the second, the two really see each other, but Sophia Loren remains as hard as a rock and does not give in to charming looks or bribing smiles .
In the end, Valery Voronin could not resist the general pressure and married the beautiful ballerina Valentina Ptitsina. The two get a newly built three-room apartment in an elite neighborhood and have two wonderful children. The family idyll did not last long. The favorite of the fans remains a favorite of women, and he himself clearly does not have the strength to stop with the adventures. Western cognac is also a tireless companion of the football player during his incessant nocturnal revelry.
Voronin divorced Ptitsina and very quickly afterwards married a factory worker who was much more willing to tolerate his infidelities. However, he directs almost all his interest in alcohol and it costs him his career, family happiness, almost everything. Shortly before the departure of the Soviet national team for the European Championship in Italy in 1968, the Soviet Alain Delon got behind the wheel drunk, fell asleep on the road and his car crashed head-on into a crane. Thanks to the surgeons, the Soviet national not only survived, but recovered in record time and returned to the field a year later.
But mental wounds do not manage to heal. Voronin felt that after the accident he could no longer return to the previous level and succumbed to depression. And it, as we know, is an ideal appetizer for any type of alcohol. The world-famous football player continues to drink and not comply with the sports regime, which totally tarnishes his heroic image. His bosses have no intention of tolerating a black sheep in the flock, and after several commissioned cautionary articles in the sports press such as “Valery, come to your senses!”, he is forced to give up his professional career. He subsequently tries his hand at working as a sports journalist and coach , but it doesn’t work for him and he prefers to stay at home and raise the bottle of vodka.
During the glory days, he made many friends, and the most loyal of them do everything in their power to pull him back to the surface. Voronin fails to cope with this impossible mission. 15 years after leaving professional sports, the one-time crowd favorite was found dead in the street. The doctors found that he had been killed by a brutal blow to the head, but the investigators failed to do their job well and uncover the killer. One version is that he was involved in a tavern brawl and was subsequently thrown into the ditch. Others are convinced that he was the victim of a robbery. The case has long been put away in the bottomless box of unsolved cases.
The sad thing is that immediately after the death of Valery, the authorities do everything in their power to hide the sad news from the football public. And subsequently, no person or organization will be found to provide him with the posthumous honors he deserves. He has already been forgotten, while the movie star Alain Delon will be remembered forever. Which hardly matters much where we’re all going in the end.