He was a great coach and a great educator.
Made of the wards not just athletes who could win and climb the podium, but developed everyone as an outstanding personality.
“And this is much more difficult,” the Olympic champion of Seoul Mikhail Mamiashvili said about the legendary Krasnoyarsk coach.
The mentor's athletic track record is truly great. In addition to the three-time Olympic champion Buvaysar Saytiev, Mindiashvili made Ivan Yarygin a legend of freestyle wrestling. Prepared two-time world champion, multiple champion of the USSR, Europe and the world Viktor Alekseev, the first absolute world champion Akhmed Atavov, bronze medalist of the 1988 Games Sergei Karamchakov, European champion Vitaly Tokchinakov, world champion Vladimir Modosyan. Received the title of Hero of Labor, and this was just a stroke to the portrait of a man who personified the great era of sports.
The coach was buried a week before his birthday - on June 4 he would have turned 88 years old. Mindiashvili saw off all of Krasnoyarsk, including the city's top officials - a 22-year-old Georgian guy came here in 1955 to build a railway line. And he stayed, having met his future wife Tamara, with whom he was destined to live for 65 years. There he began to train his very first student - Ivan Yarygin. By today's standards, it happened unforgivably late: Ivan was 18 years old. And at 28 he was already a two-time Olympic champion.
The famous Krasnoyarsk school of freestyle wrestling is also Mindiashvili. He had an amazing coaching instinct. He was very tough and demanding in training, and a man of absolutely immense soul and kindness outside the gym. In the hall, iron discipline always reigned in him. No one even had a thought that one could be late for the beginning of classes or not go out in the morning to exercise. This has always been the case, even in those years when Ivan was just beginning to train with Dmitry Georgievich.
“Any coach, probably, dreams that his pupil will achieve Olympic success, but, frankly, I’ll tell you that we didn’t even think about it then.
You have to understand what Siberia was like in those years.
It's a long way to Moscow, to get into the national team, you need to be a cut above the rest of the contenders.
Therefore, when Ivan was summoned for the first time to the training camp of the national team, both for him and for Mindiashvili, and for the entire then small Krasnoyarsk school, it was a tremendous success, ”Natalya Yarygina recalled.
According to her, Dmitry Georgievich was not just a coach, he was a teacher in the all-encompassing sense of the word, a person who thoroughly knew how his athlete's family lived, an absolute authority, to whom the guys went for advice before marrying or taking some another serious decision.
“In Krasnoyarsk, we lived on the same landing and it often happened that some completely insignificant conversation between Ivan and the coach right in the apartment turned into a training session. Dmitry Georgievich was so able to captivate that I, I remember, already pregnant, caught myself thinking that I wanted to immediately put on a suit and run along with everyone on the hill - to train, ”Yarygina admitted.
I myself met Mindiashvili in 1996 at the Olympic Games in Atlanta. Ironically, it was his first student, Yarygin, already as a spectator, who explained to me the subtleties of free-style wrestling on the platform of the wrestling hall, and another specialist's ward, the future three-time Olympic champion Buvaysar Saytiev, was fighting on the carpet. He fell into the hands of the famous coach at the age of 16, having arrived in Krasnoyarsk from Khasavyurt. And even then, according to the trainers of the Mindiashvili school, he was completely adult, which was not surprising: at the age of 13, Buvaysar lost his father and the shoulders of older children, as is always the case in large families, took care of the younger ones.
Mindiashvili made sure that the talented guy was given housing in Krasnoyarsk, broke through a scholarship so that Buvaisar had something to live on, and in fact, replaced his student's father.
How he replaced him with all the boys who fell into his hands.
He said about Saytiev when I once asked what attracted the coach to the ward:
“It's not just a matter of natural talent, although, of course, it cannot be ignored.
Buvaysar, like an animal, sensitively feels the opponent on the carpet.
Even in the most tense moments, he knows how to relax muscles, gives them rest.
At the same time, he always clearly controls the situation.
From a technical point of view, it has no weak points.
But Busik's main talent lies elsewhere.
In an absolutely phenomenal ability to endure and work. "
Two years after those Games, Buvaysar, at the insistence of Mindiashvili, moved to a heavier category, and his younger brother Adam took his place in the previous one.
If it were not for the coach (although officially Saytiev Jr. was coached by a former student of Mindiashvili, his right hand at that time, Viktor Alekseev), Adam probably would not have had Olympic gold in Sydney. A couple of years earlier, a grandiose and very ugly conflict on the part of the athlete happened between the head coach of the school and the young wrestler at one of the training camps. The entire wrestling community was then in shock: abusive behavior towards an elder is unthinkable for Caucasians in principle. Therefore, both the coaches of the national team and the head of the wrestling union, the Olympic champion of Seoul, Mikhail Mamiashvili, were united in their attitude: to drive the guy from the national team and never let him near the national team again.
When all this was once again discussed in the management's office, a phone call came from Krasnoyarsk.
Mindiashvili was on the line: “Don't touch him, I'm sorry.
We'll figure it out with Adam ourselves. "
“I probably would not have been able to forgive if something like this happened to me,” Yarygina said then.
- I know that Dmitry Georgievich was very much offended.
But he managed to push this resentment into the background, because he understood: this is the very situation when a guy can at one moment either break his life forever, throwing him out of sports, in fact, on the street, or give him a way into the future, save him for fight.
And so it happened, by the way.
Adam became an Olympic champion, won the world championship twice, now he works as a coach in Khasavyurt, he has wonderful guys. "
When Mindiashvili passed away, I thought a lot about the fact that the absolutely boundless breadth of his soul, perhaps, is the main reason why the outstanding coach never left Krasnoyarsk. In the early 70s, he tried, once even accepted an offer to move to his native Georgia, to which his entire family rooted, and open a coaching school there. But after working for a couple of years in Tbilisi, he returned to Krasnoyarsk again. After the Olympic victory, Yarygina categorically rejected the everyday tempting offer to move to Kiev - there for the wrestler, and two luxurious apartments in a prestigious building on Khreshchatyk had already been selected and prepared for his coach. But, apparently, the coach has become too attached to the endless and energetically powerful expanses of the Siberian region. Perhaps he himself felt it and did not want to come off.
The Beijing Olympics, where Buvaysar Saitiev won for the third time, I remember with a short conversation with the coach.
Seeing me in the mixed zone, Mindiashvili came up, hugged my shoulders and either jokingly or seriously said: “Thank you for coming to us.
I thought for a long time: when you are in the gym, everything goes well with us. "
In a conversation with Yarygina, I remembered this moment - they say, it's clear that those words were most likely just a duty compliment to a journalist who got in the way, but Natasha unexpectedly objected.
“I’m sure it’s not true. Mindiashvili had a phenomenal memory for people. I know for sure that he closely followed your success in journalism and was very proud of you. In the same way, he was proud of absolutely all athletes who managed to realize themselves after sports in some other profession, not necessarily coaching. I knew how hard it was, so I worried about everyone like my own child. This is probably why everyone who had a chance to cross with Dmitry Georgievich at least once was drawn to him. It was always possible to lean on it like on a wall. And to know that even in the most difficult situation this wall will never shake. "
When the country was covered by a pandemic, the coach was protected in the family as much as possible.
They locked him up in an apartment in a separate room, believing that in this way the father would definitely be able to avoid unwanted contacts - after all, infection at that age could very well turn into irreparable consequences.
Relatives did not take into account the other: complete isolation hit Mindiashvili, who could not imagine himself without work, the atmosphere of the wrestling hall and constant communication, much stronger than expected.
According to Yarygina, at first he was cheerful, then he began to weaken, lay down.
And even later, doctors diagnosed an already incurable disease - leukemia.
The trainer spent the last days in the hospital practically unconscious.
Only once did I come to my senses for a while and asked the son of Valery, the ex-champion of the country in freestyle wrestling: “How is it in the gym?
How is the preparation for the tournament going? "
The tournament in memory of Ivan Yarygin - one of the main ones in the wrestling calendar - was usually held in Krasnoyarsk in January, but this year it was decided to postpone it to May due to the pandemic. They were waiting for a big holiday, a large crowd of guests, especially since the end of the competition turned out to be almost timed to coincide with the birthday of the great coach. But it turned out that on May 24, on the first day of the tournament, the coach was gone.
On the day of his funeral, the start of the competition had to be postponed to a later time.
This was unanimously asked by all coaches, athletes, judges and officials: they all felt that they could not help but spend the last journey of the person, thanks to whom a grandiose series of great victories was born in freestyle wrestling and continued for several decades.
The man, through whose efforts the Krasnoyarsk wrestling school was asleep all over the world, and to whom even the governors went to the city with a request to take the post of an adviser.
Actually, this is another touch to the coach's portrait: being a convinced adherent of communist ideas and the owner of an extremely tough own life position in so many things, Mindiashvili was able to absolutely conflict-free, never raising his voice, find a common language absolutely with everyone with whom he had a chance to intersect.
And remembering him now, I would like to once again quote Yarygin: “With the departure of Mindiashvili, we have lost a huge era. How huge, we just have to realize. "