Ukraine has never been a hockey country. In the eighties of the last century, people tried to instill a love of hockey in the country, but it never took root. The love of football was much stronger. Therefore, against such a background of the development of this sport in the country, the appearance of an athlete who has played in various NHL teams for more than a year, spent more than six hundred matches for them and scored almost one and a half hundred goals was amazing. We are talking about such a hockey player as Alexey Ponikarovsky. Let's take a closer look at the biography of this athlete and see what contributed to the emergence of such a phenomenon.
The first steps on the ice of Alexei Ponikarovsky
Alesey was born in 1980 in Kiev, it was in this city for the first time that the future hockey player gets on the ice. At that far time, Kiev “Falcon” played in the major league of the USSR hockey championship. A little later, Dynamo Kharkov joined this team in the highest echelon. An example of the athletes of these two clubs laid the love for hockey in the then small Alexei. But his seventeen-year-old athlete took his real professional training in the junior team of Moscow Dynamo-2. This training lasted two seasons, the hockey player was noticed in his first professional club “Wings of the Soviets”. In this club, he played one season and was spotted by scouts of the Moscow “Dynamo”, for which the young hockey player played two seasons. Although Aleksey Ponikarovsky is an extreme striker in his hockey specialization and has impressive physical dimensions, in these two seasons he has scored just one goal.
Hockey career athlete
Probably, due to the physical parameters of the hockey player (his height is 193 centimeters and weight is one hundred kilograms), he was noticed by NHL scouts and put up for draft in 1998, when he was barely eighteen years old. Overseas athlete falls two years later, his first team becomes the “Toronto Maple Leafs”. Hockey career in the NHL Alexei Ponikarovsky is very motley. During his athletic life, he played in six NHL teams and even in one of the AHL teams. Often, he transferred from team to team as a free agent, while earning a lot of money. During a hockey lockout, he goes to his native Ukraine and stands for the Donbass hockey club. He ends his NHL performances in 2013 and moves to the Leningrad SKA, where he wins the Gagarin Cup with this team.
Hockey player family
Alexey Ponikarovsky has a large and happy family. Many years ago, a marriage was made with Inna Ponikarovskaya, who traveled with her husband a good part of North America. Moreover, in addition to the Ukrainian passport, Alexey Ponikarovsky, his wife, and their children also have Canadian citizenship.
The family has three children, who, like real children of athletes, move for parents from city to city. Alexey in the international arena also played for the Ukrainian team at the Olympic Games. And when they asked him why he needed a Canadian passport, he answered with a smile that he would not interfere.
Change of citizenship and transition to the Chinese club
Having played two seasons in the Leningrad SKA, the hockey player decides to accept Russian citizenship. Most likely, this is his reaction to the events taking place in the east of Ukraine, and the destruction of big hockey in this country as such. After the athlete has entered an advanced age according to hockey standards, he decides to choose a more relaxed club and earn some more money for old age.
As a result, he switched to the Chinese Kunlun Red Star. Due to the fact that Alexei Ponikarovsky is a hockey player with authority in this club, he helped his new team get into the playoffs in the first season of the KHL.