President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia congratulated the hockey player Alex Ovechkin on Monday for beating the mark of the NHL’s goals.
Mr. Ovechkin, 39, captain of the Washington Capitals, marked his 895th goal in his career on Sunday evening in a game against the New York Icelanders. This beat a record set by Wayne Gretzky who had remained for 26 years.
In a Monday declaration, Putin praised Mr. Ovechkin, who started as a professional hockey player in Moscow, for the “important result” he called “A real cause of celebration for fans in Russia and beyond.”
The sporting company – and the comments of the Kremlin – have highlighted new spotlight on the past of Mr. Ovechkin for Mr. Putin and on the position of the star of Hockey in war in Ukraine.
Mr. Ovechkin, who has played for the Washington Capitals since 2005, has lived in the United States in the last two decades. But his Instagram profile photo shows him with Mr. Putin and in 2017 he started a social media movement called #putinteam, months before the Russian elections.
The star of Hockey also raised its eyebrows in 2022 when she was unable to emit a perfect condemnation of the vast scale of Russia in Ukraine. When asked about a press conference, Mr. Ovechkin said: “Please, no more war”. In response to a question that Mr. Putin still claimed, Mr. Ovechkin said: “He is my president”, but he added: “I’m not in politics. I am an athlete”.
In his post -match observations of Sunday, Mr. Ovechkin celebrated the result with a barrage of gratitude for his players – and said: “Russia, we did it!”
On Monday, Russian state television celebrated the athlete as “our pride, a Russian hockey player who made history”, drawing “admiration on both sides of the Atlantic”.
Pro-Putin experts quickly seized the results of Mr. Ovechkin after the record goal.
“Ovechkin has shown many times that he is not afraid and is not ashamed of being Russian, even when the Russians were victims of bullying to be Russian,” wrote Sergei Markov, a political scientist with connections to the Kremlin, on social media. “This is another thing that everyone in Russia are grateful to Ovechkin, as well as the respect he won in the world, not only for hockey.”
Ovechkin has not competed for Russia internationally since 2019 and the Russian National Team has been banned from global competitions by the international hockey federation on Ice by the vast Ukraine -scale invasion.
War was a controversial question in international sports, with Russian athletes who took pressure to condemn the war.