Alexander Vinokurov — RBC: “Business is an intellectual sport”

Alexander Vinokurov is a Russian investment banker and entrepreneur. Born on October 12, 1982 in Moscow. In 2004 he graduated from the Faculty of Economics at the University of Cambridge and began his career in the investment banking division of Morgan Stanley in London. In 2006, he became vice president of private equity fund TPG Capital and participated in the creation of its Russian office. In 2011, he took the post of president of Summa Group Ziyavudin Magomedov, and in December 2014 he headed the investment company A1, which is part of Alfa Group.

In May 2017, he announced his departure from A1 and the creation of his own investment group Marathon together with Sergey Zakharov. The group owns shares in retailers Magnit, Dixie and ABC of Taste. Over the years, she has also invested in the pharmaceutical and medical business.

Since June 2025, Vinokurov heads the Russian Weightlifting Federation (FTAR). In June 2026 he initiated the creation of the Union of Power Sports of Russia, which united the federations of weightlifting, bodybuilding, power extreme, powerlifting, armlifting and streetlifting, weightlifting.

In addition, he has been supporting the development of Russian cycling for more than a decade. He participated in the creation of the professional track cycling team Marathon-Tula and continues to support it.

On the Business in Sport and Commercialization of Weightlifting

Answering the question of what business practices can be transferred to sports and how to make weightlifting commercially successful, Alexander Vinokurov believes that the sports federation should create an attractive product and develop an industry around it. In his opinion, the growth of the audience and the number of students involved is directly related to the emergence of money in sports.

“I generally believe that it is not sport as business, but business as sport. I believe that business is to a large extent an intellectual sport. Therefore, in fact, almost everything can be transferred: task setting, strategy, tactics. We can say that sport is not about money. That is, sport is not about maximizing profits, although you need to maximize profits for the sport to develop, to popularize it. So I think everything can be moved.”.

You have to make a great product, and people want to watch it, and to make an industry around sports, specifically your sport, or in principle around sports, and to make money in sports. When money comes into sport, more people come in, more people do it. We want to leave weightlifting, which will be many years after our team to live and develop. Making it a commercial thing that lived on its own is naturally long-term.”.

"If you don't have an audience, people won't go to this sport, right?" If no one knows sports, no one watches them, they will not go to play. If no one studies, you will not have athletes. You won’t have athletes, you won’t have champions. It's on one side. On the other hand, champions are also important to watch the sport. People watch sports, including where there is someone to cheer for, where there is someone to be proud of, for whom to worry, who has a history. That’s part of the appeal of sport.

About restoration of weightlifting and management of the federation

Speaking about the results of the first year of work at the head of the Weightlifting Federation, Vinokurov notes that the main task was to return the Russian sport to its former status. To do this, the team has built work in several areas - from the development of children's sports and coaching to international activities.

“This is a huge team effort. This is the team that came with me to the federation. This is a team of many people who have been in weightlifting all their lives. That is, it is a big team, starting from our office, ending with all bases and regions. A large team of caring people. And since everyone rallied quickly around the idea... Well, not ideas, but desires. The desire, which has always been, is to return to Russian weightlifting the greatness that it has historically had and which, probably, we should have in the only purely power Olympic discipline.

“You know, we approached this comprehensively. Managing a federation, running a company, is actually very similar. We need to create a team, we need to define goals in the federation itself. We have goals – from sports to the number of people involved, to the media of some specific tasks. We put together a team on targets, on blocks we had. We have blocks from the very foundations, these are children. From popularization among children to increasing the number of coaches who deal with children, to equipment specialized for children, which we first bought, and now we will produce it ourselves, ours, Russian.

“So we divided all the tasks: children, coaches, competitions, bases. International activity is also a huge block. You know, we've been reinstated. We're very happy. Before that, we restored our youth rights, which we were also very happy about. I think we have made significant progress in every block. We are not happy everywhere, we are not finished everywhere.

Vinokurov calls interaction with the regions a separate challenge for the federation: according to him, a strong team and appropriate management expertise are needed to manage such a large-scale structure.

There is a huge, complex and important layer of work with regions and interaction with regions. Because we work together with many regions. It is very important to look one way, but we have a lot of strong leaders of regional federations with the right guidelines.”.

About children, coaches and popularization of weightlifting

Answering the question of how to attract more people to weightlifting and by what criteria to assess the effectiveness of the federation, Vinokurov says about the need to develop mass sports and create conditions for the preparation of future champions. The main indicator of long-term success is the number of children coming to the section.

“To digitize [future results] is a little early, we are doing it. But we're getting more views. We started broadcasting with Match TV of the Russian Championship, viewings, all media are growing, citation is growing. In other words, our popularity seems to be growing. People should like the product, it should be interesting. In order for it to be interesting, it has to be beautiful - then people watch it. Then they start looking, then they start looking. This is how popularization grows.”.

According to Vinokurov, the task of the federation is not limited to sports results: it must provide the national team with qualified coaches and create conditions for the selection of the strongest athletes.

“The Federation must deal with a huge number of issues. She has to deal with regulation, she has to deal with calendars, she has to deal with the national team, she has to deal with popularization, sports results. The sports result should be dealt with by the leadership of the national team and, most importantly, the coaches of the national team. And the federation should do so so that there are the best coaches in the national team, so that they have everything necessary to coach athletes, and so that they have a wide bench from where to choose strong athletes. That is what the federation must do.”.

Speaking about the criteria for evaluating his work in the future of several years, the head of the federation allocates not only medals, but also the number of students, the competitiveness of Russian athletes and the number of trained specialists.

I don’t want to give specific figures, but it will be the number of children coming to weightlifting, the number of coaches, the number of children teaching, our sports results in terms of medals, but not only the weights themselves, yes, and how competitive we are with the world leaders in different weight categories. Sports performance and number of participants”.

In order to increase the number of trainers involved, the federation also developed a program to attract new coaches to the profession, including for working with children.

About the Union of power sports and the health of the nation

Explaining why the Union of Power Sports was created, Vinokurov speaks about the possibility of combining the resources of the federations for joint development, marketing and competition organization. Another goal of the union is to popularize power loads as an important element of health care.

The Weightlifting Federation is a federation that is directly engaged in the management and development of weightlifting, an Olympic sport. We gathered together with the leaders of other power federations and realized that there are huge advantages of closer cooperation in terms of popularizing each sport and overall power sports, because we have a lot of similarities inside power sports.

“The other power federations that have joined the alliance are led by wonderful people. All fanatics of their business, all for their sport to develop, to do better and attract more people. So we came together and realized that by joining our efforts, we can work together in organizing competitions, in marketing, in the media, just in sharing experiences, somewhere to share the resources that everyone needs, so as not to duplicate some things. We have many different areas of work planned.”.

According to Vinokurov, the joint work of the federations will not only optimize costs, but also expand the audience of power sports. He connects their popularization with the task of improving the health of the population.

“There is optimization, there is synergy from interaction. It's just that we all decided that working together would be better for everyone and overall power sports. And we have a lot of people engaged in power sports, including all fitness clubs. This is very important for health, medically proven, strength sports are one of the main factors for life expectancy and longevity. One of the tools, let’s say, we have. More and more research is coming out about it. That is why we want to promote power sports.”.

Vinokurov believes that maintaining muscle mass is especially important with age and therefore the development of power sports should be considered not only as a way to prepare champions, but also as a contribution to the health of the nation.

“The older we are, the more muscle mass we lose. The less muscle mass we have, the more fragile we become. This affects a huge number of body functions. I believe that muscle mass should be maintained as much as possible and then developed. The older the better. The more people are involved in power sports, the more healthy people will be.”.

Answering the question about the effectiveness of state investments in sports, the head of the federation puts public health first, and sports results second.

“I think the health of the nation, in principle, should be one of the first priorities. But in second place is the sporting result.”.

RBC has launched a special project “Autumn Marathon”. Let’s look at the sports industry from different angles – from the funding of federations to sales of sports equipment, corporate health programs and investment attractiveness of sports projects. On October 22, at 14:00 Moscow time, a direct line with the Minister of the Government of Moscow, the head of the sports department of Moscow Alexei Kondarantsev will be held on the air of RBC and Radio RBC. Send questions to the hotline through the form on the site.