No major international competition is without incident. Ice hockey world championships remember incidents for every taste and color, but one of them still stands apart. The case when at least cry at least laugh!

The 1970 Swedish World Championship was a benefit performance for the Soviet referee Anatoly Seglin. Our referee got into, perhaps, the most curious scandal in the history of the tournament. Swedish newspapers were full of photographs and cartoons with Seglin for a long time, and after that the judge himself was forbidden to travel abroad.

How did he manage to fall asleep during the match?

Sole of company

The Stockholm story was far from the only interesting story in Seglin’s life. He generally led a rather cheerful lifestyle. The future referee started as a football player in Spartak Moscow. Konstantin Beskov called him one of the rudest football players he had ever seen. In the team, Anatoly was friends with Vsevolod Bobrov. Comrades periodically found themselves in all sorts of unpleasant stories – mainly because of the hot-tempered nature of Bobrov. Seglin, on the other hand, often had to play the role of Mr. Wolf – that is, solve problems.

Vsevolod Bobrov / Photo: © RIA Novosti / V. Kozlov

After the war, during which Seglin was assembling machine guns, he discovered ice hockey. Then many Spartak players retrained and changed their boots to skates. Seglin, at the same time, was also engaged in the popularization of a new sport in the country – he wrote notes about hockey in the newspaper Sovetsky Sport.

Most of the stories that Seglin told show that he was always the soul of the company and well-connected in a variety of areas. Among his friends, he had, for example, the director of the Georgian restaurant “Aragvi”, who regularly laid chic tables for the players of “Spartak” in honor of important victories. Take a walk Seglin was a master. This played a cruel joke on him at the championship in Sweden.

A box of vodka and a new experience

In 1970, Seglin had already completed his playing career and worked as a hockey referee. Together with his colleague Yuri Karandin, he went to Sweden for the World Cup. Coincidentally, Karandin had a birthday during the tournament. Naturally, the judges took with them a hefty supply of booze in order to have a good walk in a foreign land. Seglin brought a whole case of vodka to Stockholm.

Yuri Karandin / Photo: © RIA Novosti / Yuri Somov

We decided that we should celebrate widely, in Russian. What is most interesting, they started celebrating in the morning. By noon, almost all the judges of the World Cup had gathered in Seglin’s hotel room.

– About eight people gathered, and each with his own national liquor. Everything was laid out on the table – there were only five bottles of vodka. Not less. There was a Finnish judge, so he only drank glasses. Exclusively. Oooh, and no! I’m already pushing Karandin in the side: “Yura, don’t let him drink more, you can’t drink so much!” – Seglin said in an interview with Russian Hockey magazine.

It seems that none of the arbitrators especially thought about the fact that matches should take place in the evening. It came as a surprise to Seglin when the organizers brought him a list of appointments. It turned out that he was appointed to judge the meeting of the hosts of the championship against the German team. And they put it not on the ice, but outside the gate – to light a light bulb and record goals. This referee has never done in my life.

– We gave the car to the hotel, I’m going to the palace. I sit down at the gate, as expected. And at that moment it dawns on me: you are still moving on the ice, but it is quite possible to fall asleep behind the gates. That was the end of the matter: the Swedes scored against the Germans, I had to light a light bulb – and I overslept for a moment. In the most literal sense, he zakemaril after the morning celebrations, – Seglin admitted in the same interview.

Travel ban

The scandal was huge! In Sweden, the incident was perceived with humor – many cartoons were devoted to Seglin in local newspapers. But at home, such an outburst greatly backfired on the unlucky referee. Seglin was complained about in the Central Committee of the party, where they immediately decided not to let him go abroad again. Still: in those days, such things were perceived as an international disgrace. A referee from Moscow overslept a goal at the World Cup – it’s incomprehensible to the mind!

Photo: © HC “Spartak”

However, Seglin’s connections helped him this time as well. Anatoly did not remain without work, and after 11 years he again came to Stockholm for the World Cup, but already in the status of the administrator of the Soviet team.

There, Seglin’s talent for creating stories from scratch was again manifested. After the USSR team won the final over the Swedes, he quietly added vodka to the cup. Forward Vladimir Petrov, having taken a sip from the bowl, went for a drive around the city in a Porsche. The car was borrowed from one of the local fans of our team. Of course, the drunk driver was stopped by the police. As a result, Petrov was banned from entering the country for several years.