101 Greats of European Basketball

Europe’s
winningest
player
The history of European basketball
doesn’t have anyone quite like Gennady
Volnov. He played at six FIBA
EuroBaskets and won six gold medals!
He also won four Olympic medals and
two from the World Cup, giving him 12
trophies won in the three most important international
competitions. It’s true that Kresimir Cosic
of Yugoslavia had 14 medals in the same competitions,
but Volnov outdid him at the club level. While
Cosic was never a EuroLeague champ, Volnov won
continental titles with CSKA Moscow in 1961, 1963
and 1969.
Gennady was born in Moscow on November 28,
1939, and he passed away in Moscow on July 15,
2008. He was a versatile player and, as Sergei Belov
used to say, ahead of his time. At 2.01 meters tall,
Volnov played three positions: shooting guard, small
forward and power forward. His natural position was
close to the rim due to his physical features. He was a
great rebounder, but also shot well from long range.
Aside from his qualities as a player, he was a natural
leader and served as the captain for both CSKA and
the USSR national team for many years.
The career of Gennady Volnov – his friends called
him Genka – started in 1956 with Burevestnik, a
humble club from Moscow. In 1959, at 20 years old,
he moved on to CSKA Moscow along with Anatoly
Astakhov and Armenak Alachachan. That very same
year, he made his debut with the national team at
the EuroBasket in Istanbul. There he won his first
gold medal, even though, since he was a rookie, his
contribution was not prominent. In fact, Volnov averaged
3.8 points per game and he didn’t even take
the floor in the decisive games. The following year, he
took part in the 1960 Olympics in Rome and there he
saw a genius of the game. Watching American player
Oscar Robertson, a super-modern guard at the time,
opened for Volnov new perspectives on how to play.
He understood that basketball was not only about
shooting and physical strength, but also about imagination
and creativity, that the game could be fun
without the systems created by the coach.
I saw Volnov for the first time at the 1961 EuroBasket
in Belgrade, even though I must admit that I had
my eyes on Janis Krumins, the first giant of European
basketball. At 2.18 meters tall, Krumins looked like a
colossus and attracted eyes everywhere he went. In
Belgrade, with an average of 11.7 points, Volnov won
his second gold medal. He repeated that feat in Wroclaw
in 1963 (10.7 ppg.), Moscow 1965 (12.6 ppg.),
Helsinki 1967 (11.1 ppg.) and Naples 1969 (7.0 ppg.).
In between EuroBaskets he also shined at World
Cups in 1963 in Rio de Janeiro (bronze, 14.1 points
with a high of 20 against the USA) and Montevideo
1967 (gold, 11.1 ppg.). At the Olympics, he won four
medals and, together with Belov, he is the basketball
player with the most Olympic medals. In addition to
the silver in Rome he won another in Tokyo in 1964
(9.8 ppg.), in Mexico 1968 (7.4 ppg.) he took the
bronze, and the peak of his Olympic career was the
1972 gold in Munich (6.8 ppg.).
101 greats of european basketball
Gennady Volnov
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