How Alina Kabaeva went from “most flexible woman in russia” to “Russia’s first mistress” ? The magazine Paris Match investigated the one who won the heart of Vladimir Poutine and with whom she would have 2 boys or even 5 children according to rumors. Back to the early 2000s when the path of the high-level sportswoman 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 posted on the Kremlin website and dated June 8, 2001. She then 18 years old when the Russian President decorates her in the Order of Friendship. “The gymnast is 1.66 meters tall, four centimeters shorter than him. In the images of those years, she appears smiling and her face still seems childish“, writing Paris Match.
European and world champion whose agility and flexibility command admiration, Alina Kabaeva was born in Tashkent in Uzbekistan when the country was part of the USSR, to a professional footballer father and a Russian mother. , basketball player, member of the Russian national team. The latter brought together her daughter and the legendary and severe trainer of the Russian gymnastics team, Irina Viner. Married to the Uzbek oligarch Alicher Ousmanov, it is she who will introduce the two future lovers.
The year 2001 is also the year in which Alina Kabaeva was suspended for having tested positive for furosemide, a drug that masks doping products. Then, she is injured and confined to the podium during a gala of her discipline. “So she had to sit next to our president and talk about rhythmic gymnastics. Every cloud has a good side“, slips the trainer to the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets. The article confirms:Putin was sitting on the balcony with Alina Kabaeva, with whom it turns out he had a long-standing friendship.”
There is no evidence that the romantic relationship began at this time. But in 2006, clues arise. The one who experienced a slump, marked by alcohol according to rumors that she denied, parts ways with police captain David Museliani. According to the CIA, it was since that year that she would be “linked to Putin“, seven years before the announcement of her divorce. The meteoric rise of the gymnast and her fortune attest to this closeness: she became a member of the Russian parliament between 2007 and 2014, representing the right-wing party National Media Group, the country’s powerful media group.
If Vladimir Putin tried to lock everything around his private life, some information ended up leaking. Walling himself in secrecy, he only increases the interest aroused by his special relationship with this woman. Hidden in a chalet in Switzerland, she made a recent appearance at a sporting event where she denounced the measures of international bodies against Russian athletes because of the war in Ukraine. Her face, as transformed by cosmetic surgery, did not go unnoticed. A festival in her name, Alina, will be broadcast on May 8, 2022, at the time of Russian celebrations of the defeat of Nazism.