Nikolai Valuev

Nikolai Valuev courted his wife, Galina, with his own poetry. Married in 2000, the couple has three children, daughter Irina (born 2003) and sons Grisha (Grigoriy) (2007) and Sergei (2012). The family resides in St. Petersburg.

In January 2006, he faced accusation of assaulting a security guard at the Spartak Ice Palace in St. Petersburg. However, the local police never brought any charges against him.

Nikolai Valuev was born on August 21, 1973 in Leningrad (present-day St. Petersburg), Russian SFSR, Soviet Union, as the son of Nadezhda and Sergey Valuev. He was of normal height and weight at his birth but by the time he was in the first grade, he was already taller than his teacher. Growing up, it was not easy for him to play with other children, and yet he thrived in sports where his height gave him an advantage.

Despite his sluggishness, he was part of a basketball team that won the junior league national championship. He was also a competitive water polo player and was involved in athletics, particularly discus throw.

At age 20, Nikolai Valuev took up boxing. After having his first professional match against American boxer John Morten in Berlin, Germany on October 15, 1993, and winning it, he turned amateur as that match was not initially considered as a professional contest. Trained under his future manager and promoter Oleg Shalaev, he won two silver medals at amateur championships in St Petersburg and Russia.

He participated in the 1994 Goodwill Games as part of the Russian contingent but was disqualified after his match against Morten was recognized by an international commission as a professional bout. By the time he turned professional, he had won all his 23 amateur fights, 16 of which were by knockout.

Between 1994 and 1996, he fought and won against five relatively weak opponents. From 1997 onwards, the competition became steep. On September 27, 1997, he defeated kickboxing legend Kevin Rosier with a brutal first-round knockout.

His first significant match came about on January 22, 1999, against Aleksei Osokin for the Russian Heavyweight Title. Dominating his opponent throughout the bout, he knocked Osokin out in the sixth round. Eleven months later, he successfully defended his Russian Heavyweight Title against Aleksei Varakin.

On June 6, 2000, he grabbed his first international championship, the vacant PABA Interim Heavyweight Title, after registering a comfortable win against Ukrainian Yuriy Yelistratov. Valuev would go on to win the vacant PABA Heavyweight Title against George “Terminator” Linberger on June 30, 2001.

In 2006, Valuev appeared in his first screen role in the German fantasy-comedy ‘7 Dwarves: The Forest Is Not Enough’. In Filipp Yankovsky’s 2008 sports-drama ‘Rock Head’, he played Egor Golovin, a former boxer who suffers from Susac’s syndrome. The movie received critical praise and won the main prize at the Window to Europe film festival. He shared screen space with Dmitriy Nosov and Aleksey Orlov in his next film, the 2009 action-adventure ‘The Way’.

After joining the United Russia Party, he contested and won in the 2011 Russian legislative election, becoming a member of Duma. On September 17, 2012, he lent his support for the bill to stop American citizens from adopting Russian orphans.

He founded the Nikolai Valuev Boxing School in 2009, which has offices in St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast. On September 13, 2010, he established the Valuev Youth Sports Foundation, an initiative to promote physical exercise among Russian youth.

He co-authored his autobiography ‘My 12 Rounds’ with renowned Russian sports journalist Konstantin Osipov. In July 2016, he was hired as the host for the popular kids’ TV show ‘Good Night, Little Ones’ (Russian: ‘Spokoynoy nochi, malyshi’).