Alexander Belostenny

Alexander Mikhailovich Belostenny (Russian Александр Михайлович Белостенный; born February 24, 1959 in Odessa, † May 24, 2010 in Trier ) was a Ukrainian basketball player who played first after the collapse of the Soviet Union in Spain and then in the German basketball league in Trier. The Soviet national team Belostenny 1988 Olympic Champion, World Champion in 1982 and three times European champion. After his career end Belostenny worked as a restaurateur in his adopted hometown of Trier.

Belostenny first played in the capital, Kiev, his home, the Soviet republic of Ukraine. In 1980, he was assigned to the Army Sports Club CSKA and flagship club of the USSR in Moscow. After it had reached with Kiev only to runner-up, he was with CSKA in the subsequent period four times champion of the Soviet Union. The last championship in 1984 won Belostenny with his 2.20 -meter center counterpart Vladimir Tkachenko, with whom he had already played together in Kiev and which formed a similar duo as the twin towers Hakeem Olajuwon and Ralph Sampson at the same time with the Houston Rockets in the NBA. After 1984, CSKA could against Zalgiris Kaunas club based in Lithuania, where among other things the selection player Arvydas Sabonis, Rimas Kurtinaitis and Valdemaras Chomičius played, no longer exist. 1986 Belostenny returned back to Kiev and was also associated with this club again in 1989 champions of the Soviet Union, as one could beat Zalgiris controversial in the finals. This was the only victory of Ukrainian men's team in the national championship of the Soviet Union.

After 1990, and sat Belostenny like many other former players of the Soviet Union, his career in Western Europe continued. In Saragossa, he was with the local club fourth in the championship and reached the final of the Europa Cup Winners' Cup. Rumor has it that his wife would be happy to Germany, so that Belostenny moved to Trier in the following year for TV Germania. In 1994, he finished his career there and pulled it towards a career in the dugout before, in his adopted homeland to become an innkeeper. In May 2010, he died of complications from lung cancer.

National

His greatest success Belostenny with the national basketball team of the Soviet Union. He took 1980-1992 participated in three Olympic Games, interrupted by the boycott at the Olympics in 1984 in Los Angeles. In 1988 he won in Seoul along with his Lithuanian rival Sabonis, Kurtinaitis, Chomičius and Šarūnas Marciulionis and his fellow countryman Alexander Volkov gold medal after he was able to win bronze in Moscow already in 1980. At the Olympics in Barcelona in 1992 they lost the Commonwealth of Independent States the former teammates from Lithuania in the bronze medal match.

In four FIBA World Championships, he won 1978-1990 and three silver medals in 1982 in Colombia, the gold medal when they defeated in the final round even victorious college Boys of the United States in the match for the gold medal with a dot. 1986 in Spain, the U.S. college selection retaliated to the later NBA star David Robinson with a final victory against the Soviet selection that was previously the only team unbeaten in the tournament. In the 1990 World Cup in Argentina is entered without the Lithuanian players, but with the Baltic players Tiit Sokk and Gundars Vetra, and was only the superior champion of Yugoslavia failed twice. Belostenny was one of only six players in World Cup history with four winning medals, of these had besides him only Wlamir Marques and Kresimir Cosic always reached the final and thus won at least a silver medal. As a participant of six European Basketball Championships, he won three titles and a silver and two bronze medals.