Early Life and Training
Zinoviev grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia. Sickly and weak as a youth due to meningitis, he was unable to walk until the age of four. To overcome this handicap, he swam for exercise, becoming skilled enough that he entered a Russian sports academy. There, he trained in boxing, judo, and Combat sambo. When he came of age, he enlisted in the Soviet army, spending two years in an elite special forces squad, followed by four years on a municipal police force after his discharge from the army. Like many Russian mixed martial artists, he received further training while serving in the Russian military and police forces.
Read more about this topic: Igor Zinoviev
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or training:
“O troubled forms, O early love unfortunate and hard,
Time has estranged you into a jewel cold and pure;”
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“Young, and so thin, and so straight.
So straight! as if nothing could ever bend her.
But poor men would bend her, and doing things with poor men,
Being much in bed, and babies would bend her over,
And the rest of things in life that were for poor women,
Coming to them grinning and pretty with intent to bend and to kill.”
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“When a man goes through six years’ training to be a doctor he will never be the same. He knows too much.”
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