Athletes prayed in one corner of the gym while two other wrestlers practiced at a sports complex in Grozny, in Chechnya. (C.J. Chivers/The New York Times)

Chechen wrestlers retake heritage from wars' wreckage

By C. J. Chivers

Published: September 25, 2008

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GROZNY, Russia: The Chechen boys and the young Chechen men filed into the gym just before 3 p.m. There was no locker room. Beneath a huge picture of Akhmad Kadyrov, the Chechen president slain four years ago, they slipped out of street clothes on the bleachers and then moved to the gym floor.

Soon they were in motion, shuffling in a wide circle, twisting their backs and loosening muscles in their chests, shoulders, quadriceps and arms.

It intensified. First they finished a regimen of neck and abdominal stretches, and then began somersaults, cartwheels and sprints on their knees. It ended with hand-walking and flips, in which the most agile members of the squad landed neatly on their feet not far from the prayer rug, in the corner, which faced toward Mecca.

This was the daily razminka at the Akhmad Kadyrov Sports Complex, the wrestlers' warm-up, part of the return of a Chechen athletic culture that survived nearly 15 years of war. It was held in a sports complex built on the grounds of the place where Kadyrov had been killed by a bomb.

In Chechnya, the tiny and mostly sealed-off land where male fitness and martial courage are celebrated and codes of honor are passed down through generations, sports that pit one man against another in a contest of strength, skill and stamina have an intensive following. Young Chechen men learn judo, and to box and to wrestle. In wrestling circles in particular, Chechens are regarded as among the best in the world.

But like many chapters in the story of Chechnya's long and often bitter relationship with Russia, the history of Chechen wrestling is filled with frustration, distrust, betrayal and loss.

In the Soviet period, Chechen athletes say, most Chechen wrestlers were blocked from the most prestigious events, and prevented by Communist officials from reaching the Olympics.

"I myself was a candidate for the Montreal Olympics," said Vakha Chapayev, a deputy minister for sports in the current pro-Kremlin Chechen government. "They would not take me. It was like in the past when a Chechen could not become a general in the army."

After the Soviet period, matters became worse. Chechnya tried to secede from Russia, and in the two wars and brief period of rebel independence that followed, fighting took a different, bloodier form.

Grozny was ruined. Contacts with Russia were limited. Much of a generation was injured or killed. The surviving fit young Chechen men were regarded with distrust outside the republic, where to be Chechen was to attract suspicions of being a terrorist.

Much has changed. Since 2004, the insurgency, while stubborn, has been pushed mostly out of the capital and many of the republic's main towns. And Ramzan Kadyrov, one of the slain president's sons, has become the dominant force in Chechen politics and Chechen fighting.

Kadyrov is himself a boxer and a figure who has gained notoriety and inspired fear and scorn. He has been accused of subjugating Chechnya through a campaign of abductions, torture and extrajudicial killings of suspected rebels and their families.

He has vigorously denied the allegations, and one element of his attempt to burnish his image has been an aggressive effort to rebuild the republic. As a man who sees himself as an athlete, he has ordered the construction of sports centers throughout the once ruined land.

He has also, in part to show that Chechens are both accomplished and loyal, successfully pushed to have them compete with Russians in head-to-head sports contests. The results have been swift and clear.

Terek, a Chechen soccer team, now plays in the Russian premier league and has been successful against Russian and foreign teams alike. And two Chechens won gold medals last month in the Olympics in Beijing.

One of the wrestlers, Islambek Albiyev, 19, trained part of his career at this gym. His story is like a personal tour through the hardships of being a Chechen athlete. It is also a biography that official news accounts in Russia leave out.

Albiyev was born in 1988, dusk in the Soviet Union. He passed his childhood in the first war and in the chaotic period of rebel rule in the late 1990s. In 1999, when the second war began, his family fled to neighboring Ingushetia. He became a refugee.

There he joined a wrestling team, which was ostensibly Ingush but packed with Chechens. As his skill improved during his teenage years, he wrestled under the name of an Ingush friend, so he could travel.