Nalimova, Tatyana Borisovna

Tatyana Nalimova, born in 1915, began playing tennis at the age of 12 on the courts of Tyarlev , where her parents rented a summer house. Three years later, already beating all local lovers, the girl took part in the Leningrad championship in the first category and achieved victory. A year later, at the next championship of Leningrad, Vyacheslav Multino drew her attention to him, who invited her to train at the Dynamo club on Krestovsky Island. There, her coach became the wife of Multino - Zinaida Klochkova , under whose guidance Nalimova developed a sharp attacking style of play ^[1] .

Nalimova became one of the leading paired players of the USSR. Eduard Negrebetskiy spoke of her playing style as follows: “Nalimova had a purely“ male ”game. Usually in a mixed pair game a man controls three quarters of the court. With Nalimova it was possible to divide the site in half. She played great at the net since the summer. And her pitch was very strong ” ^[2] . In 1936, she won her first USSR champion title, winning the mixed doubles with Evgeny Kudryavtsev . They repeated this result the following year, when Nalimova became the champion in women's pairs with Ksenia Dolgolenko , as well as the champion of Leningrad in singles and doubles ^[1] . Before the war, she once again won the USSR championship in women's pairs and once in the mixed doubles (with Negrebetskoy ^[1] ) and lost three times in the finals ^[2] .

During the Great Patriotic War, Nalimova remained in Leningrad, having survived the blockade there, in which her father died of starvation. She worked in the Kuybyshevsky military commissariat as a bayonet instructor. In July 1943, she won the Leningrad Championship, in which eight tennis players participated, defeating Klochkova in the final. In August of that year, along with Klochkova, she took part in the open championship of Moscow, where the Leningrads were transported by military aircraft. There they won the doubles, and in the single Nalimova became the champion after winning the final over Nadezhda Belonenko . According to sports journalist Yuri Zerchaninov, “[is] whether the new Moscow champion Tatyana Nalimova was superior to her rivals in the game class. But behind her was the supreme right to this victory - she suffered her ” ^[1] .

In the postwar years, Nalimova twice - in 1949 and 1952 - became the finalist of the USSR championships in singles ^[2] , and the number of victories in doubles increased to 21 (12 in women and 9 in mixed pairs). She won 10 titles in the women's doubles with Galina Korovina , 5 titles in the mixed doubles with Negrebetskiy ^[1] . In 1952, she became the winner of the All-Union Winter Singles Competition. She also won these competitions eight times in the women's doubles (from 1946 to 1953) and five times in the mixed doubles. Four times (in 1938 and from 1946 to 1948) Nalimova became the owner of the USSR Team Cup in the Dynamo team. 33 times she won in various categories at the championships of Leningrad. In the period from 1937 to 1954, Nalimova was one of the ten strongest tennis players of the USSR, taking first place in it in 1943. In 1948, she was awarded the title of Honored Master of Sports of the USSR ^[2] .

Outside the court, Nalimova, who graduated from foreign language courses, worked as a teacher of the German language, but then began a coaching career. In the 1950s, she first graduated from the Leningrad College of Physical Education, and later the Lesgaft Institute of Physical Culture and from the late 1950s she worked as a tennis coach in the Dynamo society. In 1968, she was awarded the title of Honored Trainer of the RSFSR ^[1] . Among the pupils of Nalimova are the USSR master of sports of the international class , USSR championship prize winner and winner of international tournaments ^[3] Anna Krasko , as well as Sergey Buryi, Sergey Vasilevsky, Nina Ivanova, Irina Mikhaleva, Andrey Nasedkin, Sergey Pavlovsky and Vadim Fedotov ^[1] .

Tatyana Nalimova died in 1995. Her memory is dedicated to the children's tennis memorial of T. Nalimova and E. Negrebetskoy, which has been going on since 1996 in St. Petersburg ^[2] . In 2015, the name of Tatyana Nalimova was included in the lists of the Russian Tennis Hall of Fame in the nomination "Pioneers of Domestic Tennis" ^[4] .

• Boris Fomenko. Nalimova Tatyana Borisovna // Russian tennis. Encyclopedia. - M. , 1999.