Novosibirsk Women

In 1986 the women from Novosibirsk won the Soviet championship and the Ronchetti Cup in the same season. They had finished second in the league the year before, and before that came three straight bronze medals, from 1981 to 1983. It ended with a team that then held the national title for three years running.

The European side of that run tells more than the domestic one. After the Ronchetti Cup, the club reached the final of the European Champions Cup, the continent's top competition, in 1987 and again in 1988. Both times it went home without the trophy, even though it was champion of the Soviet Union in both of those years.

The club began far from anything like this. Heinrich Primatov set up the team in 1955 at the Novosibirsk Electrotechnical Institute, and for its first four years it was simply called NETI. The name Dynamo came in 1966. It has been dropped and restored since: for seven years the team played as Dynamo-Energy, from 2008 to 2015 as Dynamo-GUVD, and since 2015 as plain Dynamo again. Supporters and the local press call the players Dinamovki, the affectionate Russian shorthand for Dynamo sides, and the club plays in white and blue.

After the Soviet Union ended, results dipped. The club was runner-up in the Russian championship in 1993 and 1994, then took bronze in 1999, 2001 and 2003. The Russian title has stayed out of reach, as has the Russian Cup, a competition the club has entered without winning. Nor has it lifted the European Champions Cup, the trophy it twice lost in the final.