The Flying Elephant Memoirs of an Olympic Champion Kindle Edition – Full Review

Most sports memoirs are predictable in structure. Career begins. Obstacles arise. Hard work follows. Championship arrives. Gratitude expressed. The end. Alexander Savin’s memoir is not that book.

The Flying Elephant: Memoirs of an Olympic Champion, published on Kindle on October 26, 2025, is 514 pages of first-person account written by a man who won silver at Montreal 1976 and gold at Moscow 1980, competed through one of the most politically charged decades in Olympic history, and chose to write a memoir that spends more time on the teammates history forgot than on the medals he personally collected. That’s an unusual editorial decision for an Olympic champion. It’s also what makes the book worth reading.

The Kindle Edition: What You’re Actually Getting

The book is available exclusively as a Kindle edition on Amazon globally. File size is 68.8MB – large for a text-based book, explained immediately by the 240 photographs embedded throughout. Enhanced typesetting is enabled, which means the text reflows cleanly across device sizes. Screen reader support is active for accessibility. The file size means it’s worth downloading on WiFi rather than cellular.

At 514 pages it’s a substantial reading commitment – not a weekend book unless you’re a fast reader who already knows volleyball. For readers coming in cold on the sport, allow more time. The memoir assumes some familiarity with the competitive context even as it explains itself – Savin writes as an insider narrating to an interested outsider, not as someone starting from first principles.

The translation team – Andrei Savine and Julia Savine as editors and translators, Peter Murphy as introducer, Alfredo Cabero as co-translator – produced an English text that reads as genuinely written rather than machine-converted. The introduction by Peter Murphy sets the historical frame before Savin’s own voice takes over, which is a useful entry point for readers whose knowledge of Soviet volleyball is limited to knowing it was formidable.

What the Photographs Do

At 68.8MB for a Kindle file, the photographs are not supplementary. They are a parallel text.

The 240 images come from personal family collections and Soviet-era public archives spanning five decades of volleyball history. What that means in practice: training camp photographs from Soviet facilities that no Western camera accessed during the Cold War. Olympic competition images from 1976 Montreal and 1980 Moscow. Championship match moments from the European and World Championship tournaments where the Soviet team was essentially untouchable for a twelve-year stretch. Informal portraits of the players who surrounded Savin – the teammates he explicitly names as having been unjustly forgotten by history.

The visual record is primary source material. There is no competing archive of this scope in English. Volleyball historians and Cold War sports researchers have noted the photographs as among the most significant aspects of the publication – the kind of documentary evidence that typically stays locked in private collections and state archives until a participant decides to open it.

On a Kindle Paperwhite or standard Kindle, the photographs render in greyscale, which loses some of the impact of color images but preserves the documentary quality. On the Kindle app on a tablet or phone, full color renders. For image-heavy reading, the app on a larger screen is the better choice.

The Cold War Layer That Makes This More Than a Sports Book

To understand what Savin’s memoir is documenting, it helps to understand what the Moscow 1980 Olympics actually were as a political event.

By the time the Soviet team took the court in Moscow, more than 60 nations had already boycotted the Games in protest of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The United States, Canada, West Germany, Japan, and most Islamic nations stayed home. President Carter had threatened to revoke the passports of any American athlete who traveled to Moscow in defiance of the boycott. The Games that Savin won gold at were simultaneously the largest stage Soviet sport had ever performed on and a geopolitically diminished competition that the Soviets could not frame as a complete vindication of their program precisely because their main rivals weren’t there.

That complexity is exactly what Savin writes into. History.com’s documentation of the 1980 Moscow Olympics boycott records the political context: the Soviet Union winning 195 medals including 80 gold in front of 80 participating nations – the fewest since 1956 – in one of the most lopsided Olympics ever staged. For the Soviet athletes competing that summer, the absence of their main rivals was not a gift. It was a complication. A gold medal won without beating the Americans and the West Germans was a gold medal that would always carry an asterisk in Western sports history.

Savin doesn’t pretend this wasn’t true. He writes about winning gold in Moscow with the full weight of that context intact. The victory was real. The circumstances were complicated. He doesn’t simplify either.

What the Memoir Prioritizes

The structure of the book is biographical but not strictly chronological. Savin moves between periods according to what he wants to say about each, which gives the memoir an essayistic quality that distinguishes it from the straightforward career timeline most sports autobiographies follow.

Three priorities emerge clearly across the 514 pages.

The first is collective credit. Volleyball is a six-player sport and Savin writes it that way from the first chapter to the last. The players who set his spikes, the coaches who designed the systems that made the Soviet team so difficult to defeat, the support staff who made the program function – he names them, describes them, and positions them as essential rather than peripheral. For a memoir written by the player who earned the nickname “The Flying Elephant,” it’s remarkably generous toward everyone else.

The second is the honest texture of elite Soviet sport. The training demands of the Soviet system were not romantic. Long sessions, exacting standards, intense scrutiny, and the particular pressure of performing for a country that treated athletic success as ideological proof. Savin describes the daily reality of that system without either glorifying it or condemning it in retrospect. He writes it as someone who lived it and emerged from it – which is more useful than either of the simpler framings.

The third is the mental architecture of high-performance competition. How focus is constructed before a match. How pressure is processed differently by different players. How trust within a team develops or breaks. How resilience is built not through inspiration but through repetition. These sections are the most transferable to readers who aren’t volleyball specialists – the specific sport becomes a container for observations about performance and preparation that apply more broadly.

Who the Book Is For

Volleyball enthusiasts and sports historians are the obvious primary audience and will get the most out of the sport-specific content. But the memoir’s secondary audience – anyone interested in Cold War history, Soviet society, Olympic politics, or the psychology of elite performance – is arguably as large.

The 1976 to 1986 decade that forms the core of Savin’s memoir was the decade in which Cold War tension peaked, the Olympic movement was weaponized twice in succession (Moscow 1980 and Los Angeles 1984 boycotts), and Soviet sport reached its apex before the political dissolution that would end the program entirely. Savin was present for all of it. Writing about it four decades later, with the perspective of someone who has since coached, observed, and reflected on what that era meant, he produces something that functions as historical testimony as much as personal memoir.

For Kindle readers specifically: the book rewards annotation. The photographs and the names Savin introduces are worth noting as you read. The translator’s introduction is worth reading twice – once before the memoir and once after, when the frame it provides has more meaning.

How It Compares to the English-Language Gap It Fills

Soviet volleyball’s golden era has almost no English-language memoir literature. The teams that won consecutive World Championships, dominated European competition for over a decade, and produced the most technically sophisticated volleyball played up to that point left almost no first-person accounts accessible to non-Russian readers.

The International Volleyball Hall of Fame, which inducted Savin in October 2010, documents his achievements in the formal institutional record. But institutional records don’t describe what it felt like to be on the court in Montreal when Poland took the gold away, or how the Soviet team prepared psychologically for the Moscow home Games knowing their main competitors weren’t coming. Savin’s memoir is where that description lives.

That gap is why the book matters beyond its immediate sports audience. Primary source accounts of elite Soviet sport from the inside are rare. First-person English-language accounts from Hall of Fame players of that era are essentially non-existent. The Flying Elephant fills both descriptions simultaneously.

For more on Alexander Savin’s career and what the memoir covers at a biographical level, our companion piece on Alexander Savin The Flying Elephant covers the full career arc in depth. For the broader cultural and historical coverage that masago.blog publishes, the Art & Culture category and News & City Life category have more. And for everything across the site, the masago.blog homepage has the full range.

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