This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

A film about an Olympic basketball showdown between the Soviet Union and the US has broken records in Russia, at a time when the country’s sports are mired in a doping scandal and relations with Washington are at a low point.



Going Vertical shows Soviet players claiming victory over the US in the final of the 1972 Munich Games, but skirts around the fact that the Americans never accepted defeat because of allegations of incorrect refereeing.

The movie has taken 1.82bn rubles (£23.2m) since its release in December, making it the country’s highest-grossing film ever.

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At a packed viewing in Moscow last week, Russians teared up and broke into applause as photos of the USSR team were shown over the credits.

The director, Anton Megerdichev, said the current scandals may have boosted the film’s success but the “energy of that match could not leave anyone indifferent”.

The Americans were leading by one point with three seconds left when the Soviet player Ivan Edeshko heaved a pass up the court and his teammate Alexander Belov scored the winning basket as two US defenders fell over.

Edeshko, one of four surviving Soviet team members, said the victory was nothing short of divine intervention. “It’s hard to win in three seconds without help, and that help came from God,” said Edeshko, now 72.

He recalled the official expectations that his team could not beat the US, which had never lost at the Olympic Games. “A second place was planned for us, and when the Soviet Union, a planned economy, plans, you can’t leap higher than that,” he joked.

The film was produced by the Trite studio of Nikita Mikhalkov, an Oscar winner known for his nationalist views. However, Megerdichev stressed the film had “absolutely no anti-Americanism”.

“We’re proud that we show two points of view and the viewer empathises with Americans no less than with Soviet players,” he said.