Soviet Olympic hockey champion Mikhail Vasiliev dies at 64

Mikhail Vasiliev, a Soviet Olympic gold medalist in ice hockey, died on November 5, 2026, at age 64, according to an announcement by the Ufa-based hockey club Salavat Yulaev. According to TASS, citing two-time Olympic champion Igor Larionov, the cause of death was lung cancer.

Vasiliev was born in 1962 in Elektrogorsk, near Moscow, and joined CSKA Moscow's hockey school at age eight after being spotted by renowned forward Anatoly Firsov. He traveled three times weekly from Elektrogorsk to Moscow by commuter train for training sessions lasting 2.5 hours each. After joining CSKA's senior team in 1981 under coach Viktor Tikhonov, he won eight consecutive Soviet championships over eight years and the Soviet Cup in 1988.

In his international career, Vasiliev debuted for the Soviet national team at age 20 and immediately won the 1983 World Championship. At the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics, he scored three goals in control matches against Finland and contributed goals in the tournament's opening matches against Poland, Italy, and Yugoslavia, helping the Soviet team secure gold. He also won silver at the 1987 World Championship and bronze in 1985, making him a holder of a complete set of world championship medals.

After leaving CSKA in the late 1980s following disagreements with Tikhonov, Vasiliev played for Yaroslavl's Torpedo and then moved to Italy in 1990, where he spent approximately 18 years playing for clubs including Selva, Varese, Bozen 84, and Bolzano—with Bolzano twice winning the Italian championship. He also briefly played in Denmark for Redovre. After retiring as a player, Vasiliev worked as a coach with Italian clubs, junior Russian and Belarusian national teams, CSKA Moscow's youth team Krasnaya Armiya (winning silver in the Youth Hockey League in 2014), and later with Neftekamsk's Toros, Ufa's Tolpar, Salavat Yulaev, and Nizhny Novgorod's Torpedo, which he left in 2025.

Two-time Olympic champion Alexander Kozhevnikov, a teammate at the 1984 Olympics, told Match TV that Vasiliev was "a good man, a tremendous player and coach" and called his death "a great tragedy for sport."