A photo allegedly taken in the last century of three young people has gone viral on the Internet. It is alleged that one of them is the future world boxing champion and State Duma deputy Nikolai Valuev. We decided to check if this is true.
A photo with a comment that it shows young Valuev can be found on social networks (“VKontakte", Facebook, X) and on blogging platforms (“Peekaboo", "Zen"). Captions for some posts say that the picture shows the boxer with his friends, while others say that these are his brother and sister. Many Internet users specify that the photo was taken in 1989 in Leningrad.
Nikolay Valuev was born in 1973, that is, in 1989, when, according to some users, the photo was taken, he was 16 years old. However, the person in the photo looks noticeably older. “Verified” could not find any information that the athlete has brothers or sisters with whom he is allegedly captured in this photo. Although Valuev is known for his tall height (213 cm), the man in the photo looks not much taller than the girl sitting next to him and significantly shorter than the young man on the left, which also raises doubts about the correctness of the captions.
There are not many photographs of Valuev on the Internet before the start of his sports career in 1993, but some archival photographs show the boxer shared on Instagram. It was not possible to find out exactly what height he was in 1989, however, judging by children's And youthful photographs, Valuev was always significantly taller and larger than his peers. Himself told journalists that by the first grade he “was as tall as the teacher.”
We managed to find him in the athlete’s account photo at the age of 16, taken during a trip to a competition in Finland. Despite the fact that the photo is not very clear, the naked eye can see that the man depicted in it has nothing in common with the man in the viral photo.
Reverse image search service data TinEye indicate that the photograph, which went viral on social networks, appeared on the Internet back in October 2015. Some of the posts at the time of writing the analysis are no longer available, but some entries (for example, in “VKontakte") have been preserved. These publications do not claim that the picture shows Valuev, but there are plenty of such jokes in the comments. It is noteworthy that not only the photograph itself was widely circulated on the Internet, but also screenshot one of the posts, under which users jokingly write that in the photo young Valuev is depicted together with TV presenter and media manager Tina Kandelaki and the lead singer of the group “Nogu Svolo!” Maxim Pokrovsky. Judging by the date on the screenshot, the post was published in 2015.
Thus, there is no reason to believe that the man in the photo has any relation to Nikolai Valuev. There are photographs of the boxer in his youth on the Internet, and in them he is completely different from the one depicted in the viral frame. It was not possible to find the original source of the photograph, but it began to spread no later than 2015. The authors of the posts did not claim then that Valuev was captured in the picture, but in the comments many joked about this topic. Probably, subsequently, one of the Internet users did not understand that this was a joke, and began to distribute the photo with an incorrect signature seriously.
Cover photo: social networks
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