The book "Golden skates with diamonds" with 2 autographs. Lyudmila Belousova and Oleg Protopopov

The book "Golden skates with diamonds" with 2 autographs.

Lyudmila Belousova is a Soviet figure skater, Honored Master of Sports, two-time Olympic figure skating champion paired with Oleg Protopopov.

Oleg Protopopov is a Soviet figure skater, Honored Master of Sports, two-time Olympic champion. He started figure skating quite late, as his future partner, but before Belousova, he already had a bronze medal at the USSR Championship in '53.

The future champions met by chance at a seminar of young coaches in Moscow in 1954 and decided to try to ride on the ice together. Then they realized that they were suitable for each other, both in sports and in life. The couple got married soon after.

In figure skating, at the very beginning of their careers, they suffered setbacks, but perseverance and love soon bore fruit. In 1963, at the World Championships and at the European Championships, the pair took second place and took the first medals in the history of the USSR in figure skating on the international stage. A year later, at the Olympic Games in Innsbruck, athletes win gold, thereby Soviet figure skating adequately reaches the world level.

"Golden Skates with Diamonds" is a book-a memoir of two outstanding figure skaters of the Soviet Union, a frank and honest dialogue between two people who love sports and each other, their joint life story: "... we sat down in front of our working tape recorder and began to tell ourselves about those distant days when we met for the first time, about how we learned to understand each other and how we learned to understand figure skating..."