Igor Zamansky: At present the attitude to the Universiades has changed 20.08.2010

It’s quite possible that Zamansky is a record-holder of participation in the World Student Games. Not every person is entitled to enter the international sports forum, you need to be a university student. And it’s impossible to be a lifelongr student. You turn 28 and you cannot participate in the Universiade. And to take part in three Universiades you need to study for six years.

- I participated at the Universiades as student of the Forestry Engineering Academy named after Kirov, – the current UNICS vice-captain recalls. – The main office of the institution I had been studying at is located in Saint-Petersburg, my native city. By the way I played for this team both at international and national universities championships. We even placed first once. There were a good few talented basketball players at the academy.

- Could you please tell us more about the Universiades you took participation in?
- My first Universiade was in Spain in 1999. Then it was China in 2001 and as for the third… I don’t even remember where it was held (The 2003 Universiade was held in Taegu, Korea. – Editor’s note). The thing is that before our silver medals the Russian men’s national basketball team hasn’t mounted the podium for 15 years already. The newly assembled team which included two UNICS basketball players – Alexey Zhukanenko and Evgeny Voronov – repeated our success during the previous Universiade.
How did we perform? As far as I remember our team was rather strong. It comprised ex-players of UNICS Sergey Chikalkin, Sergey Korobov and Andrey Sheyko, Alexey Pegushin from Ural Great Perm. We showed good performance in the pool play and topped the group and were to meet Mexico, outsider from the other group. And something went wrong, I guess we just got our hair down, lost the game and tumbled out of play-off. As for my second Universiade, for the life of me I practically don’t recall it. And at the third Universiade, as I’ve already mentioned, we took silver. The team was strong as well: Sergey Zazulin from UNICS and Nikolay Padius who later played in Kazan, Sergey Bykov, Alexey Savkov and so on. The team was well coordinated and besides we spent three weeks at the training camp. I’ve recently watched our photos of that time – I have pleasant memories left about that Universiade.

- At present staging the Universiade is a state matter, political matter that is taken seriously. And what was your attitude to the World Student Games back then?
- To be honest our attitude was light-minded. We come, we win, we switch off. There were no training camps except for the last Universiade. That’s the reason we all played at sixes and sevens. In recent years the attitude to the World Student Games has changed. At present Russia has a considerably serious approach to pre-event training and conditioning programmes. As far as I know a top-level training camp was held before the Universiade in Serbia, serious competitions were staged and athletes went into this event with a must-win attitude. It goes without saying that the Kazan Universiade is a milestone event. You can see it with the naked eye that everything is done to host the event, that venues are being built and the infrastructure is being updated. You can feel that people are motivated as well. After learning about my participation in the Universiades the Kazan volunteers that worked in Serbia wondered how I had played, how the competitions had proceeded.

- Will you reveal your secret how it happened that you participated in three Universiades?
- I had to repeat a year at the academy. It was not intentional of course. I don’t remember in what exact year but I had to take a study leave. I’m grateful to the head of the academy that he made a special concession since it’s not permitted to take a leave in the fifth year.