Igor Grigorenko: three championships and a Gagarin Cup
KHL.ru continues telling the stories of those who became league legends. Today, the talk is about Igor Grigorenko, who was predicted to have a stellar future, but at the very beginning of his career, he narrowly escaped death in a car accident.
Car crash
Igor Grigorenko’s career could have ended right at the beginning. Not to mention his career, the life of a 20-year-old man barely escaped. On May 16, just a few days after returning from his first participation at the IIHF World Championship, Grigorenko lost control of his car on a wet road while driving at high speed. The car crashed into a metal structure of a billboard. Grigorenko was diagnosed with a broken thigh bone and a double fracture of his ankle. Subsequently, complications arose.
In an interview with KHL.ru, the hockey player recounted that his chances of survival were less than 10%.
“After the thigh bone fracture, fat entered the body and started clogging the blood vessels. I was in a coma for two weeks. Then I woke up. Right after that, I said that I want to play hockey, and no injuries would stop me. Probably, the desire to return to the ice gave me the inner strength,” he noted.
The entire hockey community followed Grigorenko’s fate closely. He was a rising star – a former U18 and U20 WJC champion, the top scorer of the bronze-winning Lada squad in the last championship, and he played for the Russian national team in the top trio with Pavel Datsyuk and Ilya Kovalchuk at the Worlds. He was about to go to Detroit, which had won the Stanley Cup the year before. The team still included Steve Yzerman and Brendan Shanahan, Sergei Fyodorov and Igor Larionov, Chris Chelios and Brett Hull, Nicklas Lidstrom and Luke Robitaille, among others. Experts and journalists could only speculate about the heights Grigorenko would reach in his career. However, it suddenly came to a prolonged pause due to the aftermath of the accident, the exact consequences of which no one knew for sure.
Some said that Grigorenko would need three to four months for rehabilitation. Others claimed it could take up to six. In reality, the forward only began to appear on the ice towards the end of the following season.
“I spent six months in the hospital. I had an Ilizarov apparatus on my leg. I will never forget the first time I stepped onto the ice after the accident. It was very difficult. I had to learn to skate all over again. I walked on the ice, holding onto the boards. Through the pain,” Grigorenko recalled.
According to the forward, it took him about a year and a half for a full recovery.
Rising Star
Grigorenko is a product of Lada, the club where goalie Vasily Koshechkin and defenseman Maxim Kondratyev also played. 1983 brought a significant number of high-profile players to Russian hockey: Andrei Medvedev, Igor Knyazev, Fyodor Tyutin, Kirill Koltsov, Denis Grebeshkov, Ilya Kovalchuk, Stanislav Chistov, Alexander Perezhogin, Timofei Shishkanov, Andrei Taratukhin, Yury Trubachyov, Alexei Kaigorodov, and others. Notably, the Russian national team won the World Juniors in 2001 and two U18s in 2002 and 2003.
Grigorenko played a significant role in those national teams. In 2001, he became the second top scorer and sniper of the team and the tournament (6 goals, 4 assists in 6 matches), trailing only Kovalchuk. In 2003, Grigorenko achieved the same 6 goals and 4 assists in 6 matches and was tied for the tournament’s top scorer and sniper. In the final game against the tournament hosts, Team Canada, the forward leveled the score in the third period by scoring a goal against the future Olympic champion and three-time Stanley Cup winner, Marc-Andre Fleury.
Igor Grigorenko
526 games, 320 (168+152) points.
2001 U18 WJC champion.
2002, 2003 U20 WJC champion.
2003, 2011 Golden Helmet recipient.
2008, 2011 Russian champion.
2011 Gagarin Cup winner.
11.03.2001 First game in the Russian championship with Lada.
11.04.2008 First Russian champion title with Salavat Yulaev.
02.09.2008 First KHL game.
19.11.2008 First KHL goal against Torpedo.
During the 2002-2003 season, the name Grigorenko rarely left the newspaper headlines. The forward performed remarkably well in Lada. It’s important to remember that at that time, the Togliatti team was considered one of the Super League’s powerhouses, coached by Pyotr Vorobyov, renowned for his ability to organize the game and maintain iron discipline. Under his guidance, attacking-minded players had a challenging task of showcasing themselves. Yet, Grigorenko managed to exhibit his finest qualities, took the ice as part of the top line, and, as mentioned earlier, became the team’s leading scorer. And all of this at just 19 years old. During that period, experts, journalists, and fans were abuzz with talks about the emergence of a new star.
The pinnacle of the season was his inclusion in the Team Russia roster for the 2003 IIHF World Championship in Finland. Moreover, Grigorenko wasn’t brought to the tournament as a fourth-liner or a substitute. He was initially relied upon as a leader and was placed in the first line.
“Going to the World Championship was certainly significant and gratifying. And to play alongside a legend like Pavel Datsyuk... You could almost just head to the far post and wait for him to make the pass. There was no need to even position your stick – the puck would strike it on its own and find its way into the net,” Grigorenko reminisced about playing with the former SKA and Avtomobilist forward.
Three titles and Gagarin Cup triumph
Grigorenko requested to avoin splitting his career into periods before and after the injury, stating that regardless of how things unfolded, one can only speculate what might have been if that accident hadn’t occurred. In any case, the forward conducted himself admirably throughout his hockey journey. He secured three Russian championships and a Gagarin Cup, and in 2006, he earned once again a spot on the national team for the IIHF World Championship in Riga, Latvia.
In 2007, Grigorenko finally made his way to Detroit. He played in the main lineup during exhibitions but was sent to the farm team before the start of the regular season. He received limited ice time. Eventually, the Togliatti native expressed his desire to return to Russia.
Grigorenko then joined Salavat Yulaev, where he achieved the majority of his club-level successes. In the spring and summer of 2007, the Ufa franchise had an excellent transfer campaign, including acquisitions from Ak Bars such as Alexander Yeryomenko, Vitaly Proshkin, Igor Shchadilov, Vladimir Vorobyov, Alexey Tereshchenko, d-man Kirill Koltsov from Avangard, as well as Oleg Tverdovsky from Los Angeles and Alexander Perezhogin from Montreal. The club’s management made other valuable additions, including signing Grigorenko mid-season.
The result was a well-balanced team with four equal lines that proved challenging to stop. The Ufa side won both the regular season championship and the playoffs. In the semifinals, they defeated the gold and silver medalists from the previous two seasons, Ak Bars (3-1), and in the finals, they overcame Lokomotiv, which had strengthened its roster with Alexei Yashin in the offseason (3-2).
16.04.2008 Becomes Gagarin Cup champion.
11.10.2011 Traded to CSKA.
25.01.2015 First appearance at the KHL All-Star Game.
29.05.2015 Returns to Salavat Yulaev.
07.06.2018 Announces his retirement.
In the following season, the first in the KHL, Salavat Yulaev had a disappointing performance. Yes, they secured the top spot in the regular season, but suffered from a first-round exit. This prompted changes within the team. Vyacheslav Bykov took over as head coach. Players such as Dmitry Kalinin (Phoenix), Viktor Kozlov (Washington), Patrick Thoresen (Lugano), and Sergei Zinovyev (Dynamo) joined the roster. During the same 2009-10 season, the trio of Thoresen, Grigorenko, and Radulov emerged, becoming one of the best in KHL history.
In their debut season, Thoresen, Grigorenko, and Radulov accumulated 156 points in the regular season and another 42 in the elimination stage. However, Salavat Yulaev fell short of their desired outcome, losing to Ak Bars in the semifinals. Yet, the following year, the Ufa side managed to eliminate Kazan in the second round and clinch the Gagarin Cup. Their leading trio performed even better, tallying 186 points in the regular season and 51 in the playoffs.
Before the start of the next season, however, the trio disbanded as Thoresen moved to SKA. Radulov and Grigorenko reunited at CSKA in 2012. The former joined the Moscow side before the season began, while the latter joined mid-season. During the 2014-2015 campaign, the Radulov and Grigorenko duo, with support from Roman Lyubimov, once again led the team to medals. CSKA secured the gold medal in the Russian Championship, which that season was awarded to the winner of the regular season. The Muscovites also came close to reaching the Gagarin Cup finals. Leading 3-0 in the semifinals against SKA, they ended up losing 3-4. Grigorenko accumulated 45 points in the regular season and 19 in the Gagarin Cup playoffs. During the offseason, he returned to Salavat Yulaev.
In the final years of his career, Grigorenko faced another health issue.
“Not many know, but I lost sight in one eye,” the forward revealed to the official KHL website. “After the 2015-2016 season, while on vacation, I woke up one day and realized that my vision in one eye was poor. I came to Ufa and sought medical help. This led to surgeries and rehabilitation. My vision seemed to have improved. However, during the very first game after that, I collided with the boards headfirst. My condition worsened again. New surgeries in Moscow and Israel followed. I returned home, but there was darkness in my eye. It became clear that doing anything further was futile. Doctors confirmed that the optic nerve had died,” he explained.
Grigorenko retired in 2018.
“I gave hockey everything I had and concluded my career without regrets,” he commented on his decision.
Dossier
Igor Vladimirovich Grigorenko
Born: Apr 9, 1983, in Togliatti.
Career: 2000-2004, 2006-2007 – Lada, 2004-2005, 2007-2012, 2015-2017 – Salavat Yulaev, 2005-2006 – Severstal, 2007 – Grand Rapids (AHL), 2012-2015 – CSKA, 2017-2018 – Metallurg.
Honors: U18 (2001), and U20 WJC world champion (2002, 2003), Russian champion (2008, 2011, 2015), Gagarin Cup winner (2011).
