Early Amateur Career
According to his father Nikolay, Vinokourov began cycling at age 11 when he joined a branch of the Petropavl’s Children and Youth Sports School. The Frenchman Vincent Lavenu, who would later offer Vinokourov his first professional contract, reported that the young Kazakhstani was training on the road every day at age 11, and also competing in cyclo-cross. In 1986 at age 13, Vinokourov became an athlete at a sports school in Almaty, then the capital of Kazakhstan, where he would train for the next five years. While fulfilling his compulsory two-year military service requirement, Vino also trained as part of the Soviet national team.
After Kazakhstan declared independence from the Soviet Union on 16 December 1991, Vinokourov continued to train and race, though as a member of the Kazakhstani national team. He placed third behind Pascal Hervé of France in the Regio Tour amateur stage race in Germany in 1993 (Vinokourov later would win this race as a professional in 2004). Other notable performances during these early years include winning two stages at the 1995 Tour of Ecuador and the overall GC at the 1996 Tour of Slovenia. Vinokourov also competed in the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, where he finished 53rd in the men's road race – an event he won 16 years later.
Read more about this topic: Alexander Vinokourov
Famous quotes containing the words early, amateur and/or career:
“Women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictures and passes the maid of honor his telephone number.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“The true gardener then brushes over the ground with slow and gentle hand, to liberate a space for breath round some favourite; but he is not thinking about destruction except incidentally. It is only the amateur like myself who becomes obsessed and rejoices with a sadistic pleasure in weeds that are big and bad enough to pull, and at last, almost forgetting the flowers altogether, turns into a Reformer.”
—Freya Stark (1893–1993)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)