Alexander Ovechkin is probably the single most famous Russian athlete. He is also a supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and not a particularly quiet or passive one. This, occasionally, has gotten him into some hot water with the rest of the world, given Putin's corruption and warmaking. In 2017, Ovechkin launched "PutinTeam," a social media movement supporting Putin and his party in the following year's elections, which were widely decried as fixed. In 2022, following Russia's indefensible invasion of Ukraine, Ovechkin said he still supported Putin. "He's my president," the Capitals star said.
You do not, in fact, have to support a particular politician just because he's in charge, not even in Russia. Plenty of Russian NHL players have said nothing. Some have even spoken out against Putin or Russia's attack on Ukraine, which weakens the constant refrain from Ovechkin defenders that he's only on Putin's side to protect his family. It's obviously more than expedience; they have each other's cell numbers.
But for the most part, Ovechkin has avoided real criticism for his political stances. Part of this is because he is one of the greatest players ever, and sports fans necessarily get very good at separating art from artist. But another part of it is that Ovechkin seems to have a sense of where the line is, and pulls back when public opinion indicates he's crossing it. Since his 2022 comments, Ovechkin has been near-totally silent on politics. Whether or not the rumors about the NHL telling him to clam up are true, his silence has served him well. The league and many fans were able to celebrate his chases of Wayne Gretzky and 1,000 goals without guilt. Ovechkin didn't face any questions tougher than ones about his favorite Italian restaurant.
This time, however, Ovechkin appears to have miscalculated just how much he could get away with—or perhaps it was no accident. After re-signing with the Caps for what could be his final NHL season, and with the war in Ukraine still raging and hundreds of thousands dead on both sides, Ovechkin appeared in a campaign video for United Russia, Putin's party. That video aired this week, ahead of today's Russian parliamentary elections. In the video, Ovechkin and other prominent Russians—one of whom has a warrant out for their arrest from the International Criminal Court—quite literally stand behind foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, architect of Russia's foreign policy, as Lavrov blames Ukraine for forcing Russia to invade it.
The Capitals, used to running cover for this sort of thing, released an anodyne statement about Ovechkin's appearance in the video. For once, it wasn't enough. On Thursday, the first day of Caps training camp, the first few minutes of questions for Ovechkin were all about the video.
Ovechkin answered quietly and calmly. He said he is "not pro-war." He said, "Russia is my home." He said "everybody wants peace, and I hope everything is going to be OK in the world."
After answering a couple of questions about the United Russia video, Ovechkin pivoted. “All right,” he said, “let’s do hockey questions.” “Happy birthday,” one reporter said almost immediately, ushering back the illusion of normalcy. “Did you get a cake?” Ovechkin replied he is on a diet. Everyone laughed.
Empty, meaningless answers for the empty, meaningless exercise that is the typical press conference. But ESPN's Robert Klemko managed to get some one-on-one time with Ovechkin afterward. Klemko's not regularly a hockey guy; this is a time-honored media tradition of sending in an outside reporter to ask the questions that a beat reporter can't because they'd lose access. Klemko was able to press Ovechkin with follow-up questions that while answering politely, he didn't seem to enjoy being asked.
"I hope everything's gonna be good, and everything's gonna be done soon," Ovechkin said of the war.
"It'll be done soon if Putin stops the invasion," Klemko pointed out, reasonably.
"Well, I'm not in politics. I can’t say who's right and who's wrong," Ovechkin said.
These guys love doing this! They love getting involved in politics, actively putting their fingers on the scales, and then when asked any actual substantive questions about the real-world implications of the specific politics they support, shrugging and saying I'm just a dumb athlete. Sometimes they try to disguise their support of politician and party as impartial patriotism. That'll be familiar to American hockey fans, in the wake of the national team's Trump-humping.
(Let me head off any whataboutism here. Oh, so it's OK to question Ovechkin for his Putin support; should we question American players for their support of their corrupt, warmaking president? Yes! Duh!)
There are signs the Caps are getting a little tired of this song and dance. General manager Chris Patrick told ESPN that Ovechkin had not warned the team he was going to appear in the campaign video, and if he had alerted them, "we would have worked to avoid the situation very hard. And I doubt we'd be standing where we're standing right now if he had run it by us." Even couched as gently as that, Patrick's comments are probably the loudest in-house rebuke to date of Ovechkin's increasingly enterprising support of Putin.
“You would support [Russia] no matter what?” Klemko asked Ovechkin near the end of their interview.
“Well, I'm gonna live there, yeah,” Ovechkin said.
“So if they're responsible for a genocide, you would support the genocide?”
“What do you mean, genocide?” Ovechkin countered. A Capitals media relations person translated "genocide" for him, which I'm not sure was necessary given that the Russian word is functionally identical. Ovechkin groaned, according to Klemko, then said. “Oh. I would say, like, I'm, I hope it's not gonna, it's not gonna be like that.”
He and the media relations staffer then ended the interview, and Ovechkin walked away.
