Beibarys Atyrau

Until 2009 the oil city had no team of its own on the ice.

It did not take long to pay off. Beibarys won the Kazakhstan Hockey Championship twice in its first three seasons, beating Barys Astana-2 in the 2010–11 final and Yertis Pavlodar the year after. Two more titles followed, in 2015–16 and 2018–19, and along the way came the Kazakhstan Hockey Cup in 2012–13. The closest the club has come to a continental prize was the 2016–17 IIHF Continental Cup, where it reached the final and lost out to the Polish side Unia Oświęcim.

None of those championships mean as much locally as the meetings with Yertis Pavlodar.

Ruslan Saikhan was in goal for the 2018–19 title, and it was Albert Vishnyakov who settled the 2019 Open Championship final against Nomad with the winning goal in the shootout. Others have worn the colours and then gone on to the national team — Ivan Kuchin at the 2017 World Championship Division I among them — but it is those two moments, the man in goal and the man who scored, that supporters in Atyrau still bring up.

Home games are played in green, white and black at the Ice Palace named after Khivaz Dospanova, a rink that holds 1,000 and fills for the nights against Pavlodar.