How Alina Kabaeva went from “Russia’s most flexible wife” to “Russia’s first lover”? The magazine Paris match examined the one who won the heart of Vladimir Putin and with whom she was rumored to have 2 boys or even 5 children. Back to the early 2000s, when the path of the top athlete crossed that of the politician thirty years her senior, married at the time of Lioudmila and father of two daughters of the same age as this gymnast…
Alina Kabaeva’s first appearance with Vladimir Putin dates back to a photo published on the Kremlin website on June 8, 2001. you then 18 years old when the Russian President awards them the Order of Friendship. “The gymnast is 1.66 meters tall, four centimeters shorter than him. In the pictures of those years she appears smiling and her face still looks childish,” writes Paris Match.
Alina Kabaeva was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, when the country was still part of the USSR, to a professional footballer and a Russian mother. , basketball player, member of the Russian national team. The latter brought together her daughter and the legendary and strict coach of the Russian gymnastics team, Irina Weiner. She is married to the Uzbek oligarch Alicher Ousmanov and will introduce the two future lovers.
2001 is also the year that Alina Kabaeva was suspended for testing positive for furosemide, a drug that masks doping agents. Then she is injured and locked on the podium during a gala of her discipline. “So she had to sit next to our president and talk about rhythmic gymnastics. There is a good side to every cloud,” the coach enthuses to the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper. The article confirms: “Putin sat on the balcony in the company of Alina Kabaeva, with whom it turned out that he a long-term friendship.”
There is no evidence that the romantic relationship started at this time. But in 2006, clues emerge. The one who experienced a burglary laced with alcohol, according to rumors she denied, separates from police captain David Museliani. According to the CIA, she had been “linked to Putin” since that year, seven years before their divorce was announced. The gymnast’s meteoric rise and fortune are testament to this closeness: she was a member of Russia’s parliament between 2007 and 2014, representing the right-wing United Russia party, then the National Media Group, the country’s powerful media group.
When Vladimir Putin tried to lock down everything related to his private life, some information leaked in the end. Walling himself up in secrecy only heightens the interest aroused by his special relationship with this woman. Hidden in a chalet in Switzerland, she recently appeared at a sporting event where she denounced the actions taken by international bodies against Russian athletes over the war in Ukraine. Her face, altered by cosmetic surgery, did not go unnoticed. A festival in her name, Alina, will be broadcast on May 8, 2022 at the time of Russia’s celebrations of the defeat of Nazism.