HANDBALL PLAYERS from Ukraine

Top 2

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Ukrainian Handball Players of all time. This list of famous Ukrainian Handball Players is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.

1. Zinaida Turchyna (b. 1946)

With an HPI of 48.27, Zinaida Turchyna is the most famous Ukrainian Handball Player.  Her biography has been translated into 17 different languages on wikipedia.

Zinaida Mykhaylivna Turchyna (Ukrainian: Зінаїда Михайлiвна Турчина, née Stolitenko on 17 May 1946) is a retired Ukrainian handball player. Coached by her husband Igor Turchin she competed for the Soviet Union in all major international tournaments in 1973–1988, except for the boycotted 1984 Summer Olympics, and won three Olympic and five world championship medals. In 2000, a panel from the International Handball Federation and sports journalists named her the best female handball player of the 20th century. Stolitenko was brought to handball in 1959 by Igor Turchin, a team-sports coach 10 years her senior, who later headed HC Spartak Kyiv from 1962–1993 and the Soviet handball team from 1973–1993. She married him in 1965 and changed her last name from Stolitenko to Turchyna. They had a daughter Natalia (born 1971) and a son, Mikhail (born 1983). Natalia played handball alongside her mother for Spartak Kyiv, while Mikhail went into basketball. After the death of her husband in 1993, Turchyna took over his coaching positions at Spartak Kyiv and the Ukrainian national team. She retired from coaching in 1996, but still works as the manager of Spartak Kyiv. Since 2002 she has lived with her boyfriend Vladimir.

2. Irina Poltoratskaya (b. 1979)

With an HPI of 35.58, Irina Poltoratskaya is the 2nd most famous Ukrainian Handball Player.  Her biography has been translated into 19 different languages.

Irina Igorevna Poltoratskaya (Russian: Ирина Игоревна Полторацкая, born 12 March 1979 in Antratsyt, Luhansk Oblast, Ukrainian SSR) is a Russian team handball player, playing on the Russian women's national handball team. She won gold medal with the Russian winning team in the 2005 World Women's Handball Championship in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and again in the 2007 World Women's Handball Championship in France. Irina's career in Russia was stopped by a knee injury. Anja Andersen, the coach of Slagelse Dream Team, Denmark brought Irina to Slagelse DT in 2004, and a few months later she underwent surgery and got a new meniscus. The operation was successful, but only a year later did Irina return to the field. Irina scored on penalties for Slagelse in the Champions League final, and she gave Anja Andersen her gold medal from the World Cup, as a thank you for helping her return to the world of handball. Irina left Slagelse after some time and returned to the Russian national team (though a smaller role than before), where she ia. played alongside Emiliya Turey, who she also played with when she played for Slagelse. She is the wife of Russian handball player Timur Dibirov who plays for Macedonian club RK Vardar.