Oleg Garin

Oleg Sergeyevich Garin was born on 22 September 1966 in Nakhodka, a port city in Primorsky Krai in the Russian Far East. He said he knew by the age of six that he wanted to be a footballer, in an era when, as he recalled, boys in every Soviet courtyard played football after school. He trained at the youth sports school in Vladivostok.

As a teenager he joined Luch Vladivostok, then in the Soviet Second League, and played three matches for the club in 1984 before he was called up for army service. He never returned to Luch, and later spoke of the rivalry between Nakhodka and Vladivostok as the real Far Eastern derby of his playing days.

Garin joined Okean Nakhodka in 1987 and spent six seasons there, scoring 87 goals in 202 league matches. Okean won the RSFSR Cup in 1989, finished third in the eastern zone of the Soviet Second League in 1990 and won it in 1991. After the break-up of the Soviet Union the club was placed in the new Russian top division for 1992, and on 3 April 1992 Garin scored Okean's first goal in Russian championship football, after two minutes against Lokomotiv Moscow. That season he was named third in the list of the 33 best players in his position.

Lokomotiv's coach Yuri Semin signed him in 1993. In Moscow he formed one of the club's main attacking threats of the mid-1990s, scoring 40 goals in 118 league games between 1993 and 1997. His 20 goals in the 1994 championship set a club record for a single Russian league season that still stood at the time of his death. Lokomotiv finished third in 1994 and second in 1995 and won the Russian Cup in 1996 and 1997, and Garin played in the UEFA Cup and the Cup Winners' Cup. He was named number two in his position in the season's 33 best players in both 1994 and 1995, and in 1993 he played three matches for the Russia second team, scoring against Bolivia.

In 1998 he moved to Lokomotiv Nizhny Novgorod, helping them finish second in the First Division and return to the top flight. He then played briefly for Uralan Elista in 1999 and Lada Togliatti in 2000 before returning to Okean, where he retired in 2001. In the Russian top division he played 161 matches and scored 57 goals.

Garin said he became a coach within about a week of finishing as a player. In 2002 he took charge of Neftyanik in Nogliki on Sakhalin, which won the Far East and Sakhalin championship under him, and that success brought an offer to manage Okean, which he did from 2005 to 2007. He coached Metallurg Krasnoyarsk in 2007 and 2008. At Dynamo Bryansk he was a coach in 2010 and 2011, caretaker head coach in May 2011, and head coach from March 2015 until April 2016. In December 2017 he was appointed head coach of the women's team of Yenisey Krasnoyarsk in the top division, and he led it through the 2018 season. He also worked with young players at the Konoplev football academy.

In his final years he was senior coach of SKA-Khabarovsk-M, the youth side of SKA-Khabarovsk, which entered the Russian Youth League for the first time in 2026. He worked as assistant to head coach Aleksandr Sapezhnikov, who had played under Garin for about three seasons at Okean.

Garin always described Nakhodka as his home and said that Okean meant as much to him as Lokomotiv. His nephew Aleksandr Tikhonovetsky, born in 1979 and also known as Aleksandr Garin, became a professional footballer as well.

In an interview published by SKA-Khabarovsk to mark his 60th birthday on 22 September 2026, he said that what he most hoped was that the players he coached would remember their coaches with kind words, as he had always remembered his own. In Khabarovsk he lived in a rented flat.

SKA-Khabarovsk announced on 20 October 2026 that Garin, senior coach of its SKA-Khabarovsk-M team, had died suddenly in his 61st year. He was 60. The club expressed its deep condolences to his family and friends, saying it shared their pain and grieved with them.

His former Lokomotiv teammate Yuri Drozdov told the sports site Championat that Garin had said he felt unwell before the team's latest away trip and had stayed at home in Khabarovsk. When the team returned and could not reach him by phone, people went with the landlord to the flat he rented and found his body. A source quoted by the TASS news agency said the death was sudden, that a heart attack was one possible cause, that he had not previously complained about his health, and that it was neither a criminal matter nor an accident. The club's press service also said his death was linked to health problems. No official cause was published, and the exact date of death was not given in the reports; 20 October 2026 is the date the death was announced. Funeral arrangements had not been reported.

Garin is remembered as one of the outstanding footballers to come out of the Russian Far East and as a key figure in the Lokomotiv Moscow side that Yuri Semin built into a regular European competitor in the 1990s. His 20-goal season in 1994 stood as a Lokomotiv record for more than three decades, and the two Russian Cups he won in 1996 and 1997 were among the club's first trophies of the post-Soviet era. In Nakhodka he is remembered as the striker who scored Okean's first goal in Russian top-flight football. After his playing days he spent a quarter of a century coaching, much of it in the Far East and Siberia, passing on what he had learned to young players.