AFL grand final: Quirky Collingwood Magpie Oleg Markov’s rollercoaster journey from Belarus to footy’s biggest stage
Oleg Markov’s world champion pole vaulter dad opens up about his quirky son’s board game nights, the Russian poem tattooed in his mum’s handwriting and rollercoaster journey to the GF.
Dmitri Markov is used to jumping towards the sky.
As a pole vaulter, he won a world title in 2001 and a Commonwealth Games silver medal in 2006.
As a dad, he leapt out of his MCG seat at the final siren of the preliminary final after watching his son Oleg’s Collingwood side beat GWS by one point.
“We were screaming,” Dmitri tells this masthead.
“It was pretty emotional.
“Probably everyone who support Collingwood was.”
Dmitri competed in large stadiums during a career that took him to world championships, three Olympics and the Melbourne Commonwealth Games, where he competed on the MCG.
But he was taken aback by the noise and magnitude of the 97,665 in attendance at the home of football last week.
“The crowd was so amazing,” he says.
Dmitri, his wife Valentina and their other son, Tony, 20, had a chance to soak up the atmosphere on the ground pre-game, forming a guard of honour with other Magpies’ families.
“We walked out onto the stadium … and it was unbelievable,” Dmitri says.
“Oleg ran, saw us and come to say ‘hi’.
“We’ve just wished him good luck, told him to enjoy himself and show what he can do.”
Oleg has been demonstrating his talent – and quirk – in his first season at the Magpies, his third AFL club.
Signing as a rookie in February, during the supplemental selection period, the moustachioed, tattooed halfback has played 22 of the club’s 25 games, keeping his spot since round 4.
A grand final at the MCG on Saturday is a long way from Queensland state league footy, where the 27-year-old may be playing if not for a call from Collingwood coach Craig McRae.
It is much further from where Oleg’s remarkable story begins, in Vitebsk, Belarus, his birthplace and Dmitri’s hometown.
Oleg was 10 months old when the Markovs moved to Australia in search of a better life.
After the collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s, Dmitri and decathlete Valentina saw a future Down Under, where they had attended sports camp.
They arrived in Australia in 1997 with coach Alex Parnov and pole vaulting couple Tatiana Grigorieva and Viktor Chistiakov, then were granted citizenship in 1999.
“It was a crazy time when the USSR fell apart,” Dmitri, now 48, recalls.
“People were killing each other, there was massive crime everywhere and we’d been before to Australia … and had loved this country.
“Our coach got an invitation to come here and we just followed our coach.”
Dmitri, who had placed sixth at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, representing Belarus, competed for Australia in Sydney and finished fifth.
A year later, he won world championship gold in Edmonton, Canada.
Dmitri also went to the Athens Olympics in 2004, before adding silver in one of his last major events, the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne.
Seventeen years on, Oleg will play there on football’s biggest stage, having chosen his sporting path without pressure from his parents.
He started Auskick, then played at Gepps Cross in SA and joined SANFL club North Adelaide’s juniors.
Oleg also showed potential in gymnastics and high jump.
“We never pushed him to do any sport at all,” Dmitri says.
“He did gymnastics and was pretty good, won a state championship, and then he did a little bit of high jump.
“He was planning to go to world youth (titles) … he was pretty close, but then footy season started and he said ‘no, no more athletics anymore’.”
Could Oleg have followed family footsteps by representing Australia in track and field?
Dmitri believes so, citing his son’s strong discipline and routine, even as a youngster.
Oleg’s athleticism instead helped him catch the attention of footy recruiters.
Richmond selected the then-forward with pick 50 in the 2015 national draft.
“That was a great night,” Dmitri says.
“It’s not just telling you to go in a competition, for example like before a Commonwealth Games or a nationals.
“This was for his career, not just one competition.”
Dmitri knew only a few footy rules back then, such as “if it’s a goal, it’s six points”.
As for now: “I know a little bit more,” he says with a laugh.
Some confusion about umpiring interpretations remains.
Safe to say he is not alone.
“Last game lots of people were surprised about the decisions from the referees,” Dmitri adds.
“Sometimes they think it should go the other way, but the referees said ‘no, this way’ and a lot of people disagree.”
Last week was Oleg’s second final, his first being a fortnight earlier against Melbourne.
Although Richmond won three premierships when he was at the club, he never got an AFL opportunity in September or October.
In 2017, Oleg was dropped after the last minor round.
In 2019, he had to settle for a VFL flag.
“He’d been picked before finals but then last-minute before finals they’d drop him,” Dmitri says.
“He said ‘what can I do? Someone else just showed they were better at that time’.”
At the end of the 2020 campaign, after 23 games in five seasons at the Tigers, Oleg sought more opportunities elsewhere and joined Gold Coast.
He was delisted two years and 28 games later.
Oleg was set to turn his back on the AFL, starting a new job as a support worker on the Gold Coast and talking to QAFL clubs, until ex-Richmond VFL coach McRae rang.
What followed next had more twists than the last quarter of a Collingwood comeback victory.
Oleg completed four weeks of pre-season with the Magpies in January, only for them to sign SA ruckman Oscar Steene.
An opportunity to audition at Carlton emerged when Zac Williams suffered a serious knee injury.
After doing a medical, Oleg trained with the Blues for the first time three days later but Collingwood came back in for him once Charlie Dean’s foot injury opened a list spot.
“Oleg was happy straight away,” Dmitri says.
“Even though it’s harder to get into the team, they’re quick and the game they’re playing is more suitable for him.”
Oleg lived with his parents for two months once he returned to Melbourne from Gold Coast.
Job opportunities and the chance to be closer to Oleg led the Markovs to move to Victoria from Adelaide in 2018.
They own a gym, Smart Fit Studio, in Richmond and Dmitri also works as a carpenter.
Oleg is close to his family, but the cheeky Magpie does things a little differently to them.
Take the moustache for instance.
“Oleg has just been growing and growing it,” he says.
“I’ve said and my wife she’s said ‘go and shave it’, but he said ‘no chance’.
“I don’t know where it’s come from.
“Even our younger one has got a moustache.”
Markov has had a mo since his draft year – well before most other AFL players started rocking them – making him standout from the crowd.
“Yeah, probably he just goes this way,” Dmitri says.
“Try something different.”
While tattoos are far from unusual in the AFL any more, Oleg’s Russian and Belarusian-inspired ink catches the eye.
Among them is a bow-tie wearing owl on his chest, a dagger on his left arm and a whole lot of Cyrillic text.
Oleg’s favourite and the most meaningful tattoo is a poem, The Angel, by Russian Alexander Pushkin.
Without any ink himself, Dmitri did not like it when Oleg first started covering his body.
Oleg helped change his parents’ perception by including them in the process a few years ago.
Valentina chose The Angel, now tattooed on his ribs and inked in her handwriting, in Russian.
“Oleg asked if she could find a good poem,” Dmitri says.
“It didn’t come overnight, she spent one or two months to find.
“She wanted it to be special.
“She read lots of poems and this really suits him.”
Oleg has never been back to Belarus.
He gets a taste of his homeland at his parents’ place, visiting usually once a week.
They speak Russian when they are together.
Shuba salad, otherwise known as fish under a coat – which features boiled potatoes, pickled herring, beetroot, mayonnaise, egg yolk – is Oleg’s favourite Russian meal.
He occasionally leaves his parents’ apartment with 2kg of pelmeni, a traditional, stuffed dumpling.
Before and after dinner, they play cards, such as Durak, or board games, like Ticket to Ride: Europe.
“When he comes, we just play and talk, play and talk, play and talk,” Dmitri says.
“If he’s got a lot of time, we play games, if not a lot of time, we play cards.”
Dmitri’s nerves are growing as Saturday’s big match approaches.
The proud father believes Oleg winning a premiership will in some ways be a more significant achievement than his world title because of how far his son has come.
“Back home in Belarus, we never see footy,” he says.
“We’d see American football but it’s normally soccer and ice hockey.
“When we moved here, we’d watch footy sometimes because it was something unusual.
“In that time, it was a really rough game – more rougher than today – and looked like a mix between soccer with boxing or wrestling basically with an oval ball.
“He found the sport which we didn’t know about and he’s got pretty close to the top.
“If they’re going to win the grand final, this is massive.”
High on a wall in the Markovs’ gym is Dmitri’s old pole vault bag with his name and “Australia” on it.
His world championship record of 6.05m stood until last year when Sweden’s Armand Duplantis surpassed it.
“I wouldn’t mind to still have the record, but it’s nice to see someone jump higher,” he says.
“It’s a great feeling when you go from the bottom up, not the top down.
“People say ‘how do you feel when you land from six metres to the mat?’
“I tell them ‘it’s not a big deal, you can go from a second floor and jump from a window on a mat’.
“It’s a really big deal when you go from the ground up to the top.”
As the three-time Olympian reflects fondly on his own career, his focus quickly switches to the heights Oleg has been scaling.
“Every athlete wants to medal from an Olympic Games,” he says.
“You can’t go any higher in this game, footy.
“I’m happy with my medal and to have him with his medal, oh, same family, different medals … we’d fly through the moon a million times, it’d be really, really special.
“When he did athletics, we support his athletics, he did gymnastics and was happy in gymnastics.
“Now he’s doing footy and we wish for him to get the top star, to touch the sky.”
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