Football commentator Alexander Elagin is a very unusual person. Before joining sports journalism, he managed to work as a janitor, advertiser, and even an actor. Today, Elagin is a commentator with a big name, the voice of a whole generation that grew up in the late nineties and early 2000s.
early years
Alexander Viktorovich was born in Moscow in 1953. He studied at the international department of the journalism faculty of Moscow State University, which allowed him to travel in Europe in the future, unlike most Soviet citizens. It is clear that the list of countries was strictly regulated, so Elagin had the opportunity to work only in Czechoslovakia. He stayed there for four years, and then returned to the USSR.
Theater
In the theater, Elagin tried himself in his school years. At 22, he began working under the direction of director Roman Viktyuk. Elagin calls him his teacher, who made him a real actor. A comfortable and well-paid job in the Union of Friendship Societies, through which Alexander Viktorovich had previously left for Czechoslovakia, he preferred a theater studio with a salary of 150 rubles. It was the colossal theatrical boom of the mid-eighties that pulled Yelagin out of Prague, where Valentina Tereshkova was his boss.
REN-TV, 7-TV, NTV-PLUS
In the turbulent nineties, Alexander Elagin managed to work as a sports news anchor on the 2x2 channel and as an advertiser on Ekho Moskvy radio station. Since 1996, Elagin is a commentator on the matches of the English Premier League on REN-TV. His professional debut was the match at the Super Bowl of England, where Newcastle beat Manchester United 5-0. Since then, in the minds of many Russian football fans, Alexander Yelagin, then a completely new and not very experienced commentator, began to be associated precisely with Misty Albion.
Theatrical career Yelagin had to end. In the nineties, the theater paid negligible, and the atmosphere itself changed dramatically not for the better. Professional disagreements began with colleagues in the workshop, problems of understanding.
After leaving REN-TV, Elagin was already a commentator on 7-TV. The profile remains the same - the English Premier League. He combines commenting activities, working as a host of the Football Chronicle program.
Alexander Yelagin worked on 7-TV until 2009, until the TV channel finally re-qualified as an entertainment one.
The next six years, Yelagin is a commentator on the NTV Plus sports channel, where Vasily Utkin called him.
Match TV, Eurosport
After the creation of the large sports holding “Match” in 2015, the entire commentary headquarters of NTV-Plus was disbanded. Most of the journalists continued to work on the “Match”, others, like Vasily Utkin or Vladimir Stognienko, went to other channels. Today, Elagin is a commentator at the Match, but a freelance, working on a fee basis. He still remains the main voice of the English championship. Very few commentators can compare with him in the knowledge of the history of British football, as well as all the context surrounding the English championship.
Alexander Viktorovich is stoic about the role of a freelancer and is even looking for advantages in this. One of them is the possibility of combining. Since the summer of 2016, Elagin has been a commentator (photo above) on the Eurosport channel. There he pleases the viewer while working at the matches of the Championship - the second most important English division.
Hobbies
Alexander Elagin is a real esthete. In addition to the theater, he is interested in classical music: Wagner, Rossini, Mozart, Tchaikovsky. While in Prague, he and his wife visited the Wagner Opera, which lasted six hours. He is also a big fan of Mark Bernes - one of the main representatives of the Soviet stage of the 40-50s.