A New Star, Aiming Higher 

Staten Island Advance - Tuesday, April 15, 2008

These days, Pasha Buyanov can't seem to turn around without bumping up against his newfound celebrity. The 24-year-old College of Staten Island freshman from Novosibirsk, Siberia, can't go to class, or to practice, or to meet with his coach without his own image staring back from the posters plastered on the entrance to CSI's Sports and Recreation Center, celebrating Buyanov's double triumph at the NCAA Division III Swimming and Diving Championships in Oxford, Ohio.

"They did their best to make me famous," he says. "Sometimes I feel it's too much already."

But, hey, that's what happens when a school like CSI has waited 32 years to celebrate its first national champion, and winds up with a double winner, one good enough to dream of swimming in the Olympics this summer.

"The golden fish," Oleg Soloviev calls him, a phrase that goes all the way back to the old Soviet Union, to a time when Soloviev was turning out national champions and world record-holders for a Communist Party bureaucracy that was never satisfied.

Like his newest star, the CSI coach is from Novosibirsk, a modern city that ruins the picture Americans have of Siberia as a frozen home to polar bears and ice flows.

"Maybe somewhere in Siberia, there are polar bears," Buyanov says.

"The only wild animals I saw were in the zoo."

The Internet, and shared goals brought them together at CSI. And right from the start, Soloviev saw the potential in his newest recruit.

Buyanov had a classic swimmer's build: wide through the shoulders, but not so big that his internal combustion engine gets tired pushing all that bulk through the water.

And he had championship technique, even after a two-year layoff from formal competition.

What Soloviev couldn't know -- not then, anyway -- was how much Buyanov, who never swam up to his own expectations as a teenager in Siberia, wanted to be great.

He couldn't know how deep Buyanov would be willing to reach, when the work load was intense, or the competition forced him to stretch himself; or if coach and swimmer could form the kind of bond that produces champions.

"When they're young, it's easy," Soloviev says. "When they're 14, the coach is God.

"But when Pasha comes here, he's 23, he's been to university -- he's a man. He's been coached by a lot of coaches.

"He comes with his background -- his disappointment -- he's looking at you, judging you.

"It's hard to get his trust."

Not so hard, as it turns out. With more time to train, and unlimited access to the CSI pool and the running paths in Willowbrook Park, a few minutes from the apartment he shares with another Russian swimmer, Buyanov carved seconds off his best times.

It only made it more fun when he got to share each success with his new teammates.

"In Russia," he says, "you swim mostly for yourself. Here you know you're not alone. You have people behind you. You feel that support, and it becomes a responsibility.

"It makes you swim faster."

At the national championship meet Buyanov came from behind in the finals of the 100-yard breaststroke, touching out two-time national champion Nelson Westby at the wall, and breaking a nine-year-old meet record in a time that thrust him into the top 50 breaststrokers in the world.

Then he did it again in the 200, swimming the second half of the race faster than the first, to pass a fading Westby and win gold for the second time in as many days.

Now, Soloviev says, the really heavy lifting begins.

A few days after they got back to Staten Island, he gave Buyanov two options.

He could enjoy his newfound notoriety, maintain his fitness through the summer, and come back in September ready to defend his titles.

Or he could spend the next eight weeks trying to find the few fractions of a second that could put him on the podium at the Russian Olympic trials in June, and punch his ticket to the Beijing Olympics.

The second option, Soloviev warned him, wouldn't leave any time for fun.

"Only pool, eat, sleep, and study," Soloviev says.

"Nothing else.

"I gave him two days to sleep on it," Soloviev says, and then he shrugs.

"Is easier for me if he says no," he says.

Buyanov didn't say no. But for his coach, the commitment to train for an Olympic berth in Mother Russia is more complicated, and fraught with conflicted emotions.

Soloviev came to this country 19 years ago to get away -- "escape," he says -- from the restrictions of the old Soviet system.

"Too much control," he says. "There is always somebody over you who knows nothing about athletics, who can spit on you and you die, if you're not dancing to their music."

"Now I don't have to dance."

Not every story of Russian immigration has a happy ending. Soloviev has seen professionals trained to be scientists and university professors, who wound up working at entry-level data processing jobs in the U.S., or driving taxis.

By any measure, he says, he's fortunate to be working at what he loves, and he planned to stay at CSI forever, even before Buyanov showed up on his doorstep.

"If I'm lucky, I die on the deck," he says, waving a hand in the direction of the pool on the other side of the door, where recreational swimmers are turning laps. "Wherever I fall down, that's it -- my last day of work."

But not yet. Not until he's finished grooming his golden fish.

Not until Pasha Buyanov finds out how fast he can go, swimming for his old country and his new school, with his Dolphin teammates and their conflicted coach adding fuel to his fire, pushing him faster than either of them dared to dream.  

By Jay Price
Reprinted here with permission from the