Красная машина

The Red Machine

B2 · Upper Intermediate · non-fiction · 10 scenes · Premium story

An upper-intermediate documentary on how a country with three covered rinks, no pucks and hand-made sticks became world champion at ice hockey eight years after taking the game up. The answer is not talent: it is a nation already standing on skates from bandy, a coach who refused to copy the Canadians and looked in ballet and chess instead, and a unit of measurement nobody else was using. It tells 1972 accurately — Canada won that series — and tells Lake Placid as the defeat it was. The last chapter is about what the machine cost the men inside it, which they still do not agree on.

Read Красная машина in Russian

Characters

Anatoly Tarasov (Анатолий Тарасов) — Coach, 1918–1995
Vladislav Tretiak (Владислав Третьяк) — Goalkeeper, born 1952
Viktor Tikhonov (Виктор Тихонов) — Coach, 1930–2014
Igor Larionov (Игорь Ларионов) — Centre, born 1960

Vocabulary from this story

хоккей — ice hockey
шайба — puck
клюшка — hockey stick
коньки — skates
лёд — ice
каток — rink
ворота — goal
вратарь — goalkeeper
защитник — defenceman
нападающий — forward
пятёрка — five-man unit
пас — pass