If you’re going to succeed in the grueling winter sport of biathlon, you need to be skilled at cross-country skiing and rifle shooting. You know what might help with the latter? Being a former KGB agent. That’s what’s on the resume of Darya Domracheva, a biathlete who won a gold medal in the women’s 4x6km relay at the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang on Thursday.
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Winter Olympics Dominance
As The Guardian reports, Domracheva—who is 31 and hails from Belarus—has six Olympic medals in biathlon to her name. That includes a gold and a silver at these Olympic games, three gold medals at Sochi in 2014, and a bronze in Vancouver in 2010. But it’s her background that seems to be making headlines after it was revealed that she used to work for the KGB.
KGB Agent Past
Domracheva’s KGB past was actually uncovered a couple of years ago when Dynamo Sports Club posted a profile of her on its website. The profile was then deleted. Dynamo Sports Club is a fitness society established in the Soviet Union in 1923. Domracheva is evidently a member of the club.
A spokesman confirmed to Inside The Games that Domracheva had indeed served as a lieutenant in the State Security Committee of the Republic of Belarus until June 2014. Translated into Belarusian, the committee has the initials KDB. Translated into Russian, however, its initials are KGB. The State Security Committee is one of the few intelligence agencies to have kept the KGB name after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
“Domracheva had worked for the KGB until June 2014, but at the moment Darya is not an employee of the Committee,” KGB spokesperson Dmitry Pabyarzhin said.
Belarus has been described as Europe’s “last dictatorship.” Its president, Alexander Lukashenko, has been in power since 1994. He has been sanctioned for human rights violations by the EU and the United States.
None of that, of course, applies to Domracheva, who is simply happy to win the gold medal for her country.
“You keep dreaming all race. We were very excited at the front of the race, and of course the [feeling] today is just happiness,” she told reporters after the race, according to The Guardian. “You can see how we are Olympic champions and I could say that the whole team were really, really strong.”
