Torpedo

The Boris Alexandrov Sports Palace holds 4,400 people now, down from the 5,200 it seated when it opened in 1968. The arena carries the name of the man who once coached there, a local hockey figure and Olympic champion, and it is still where Torpedo plays.

The club itself began in 1955, when Nikolai Konyakhin arrived from Elektrostal and put a team together under the banner of the Ulyba Metallurgical Plant. It took until 1957 for that team to enter the Kazakh SSR championship, where it finished with silver, and by 1964/65 it had reached the Soviet championship's second group. Promotion to the Soviet top flight came only in 1987, after a spell in the Second League between 1977 and 1980 had already tested how far the club could fall.

The Soviet collapse hit harder. Money from the metallurgical plant dried up, the team passed briefly into private hands as Altai-Torpedo, and it took until January 2000 for a three-way agreement between the regional government, the club and the mining company Kazzinc to put it back on stable ground as Kazzinc-Torpedo. Kazzinc's backing rebuilt the arena and funded a run of thirteen Kazakhstan championships between 1993 and 2007. The club dropped the sponsor's name in 2015, returning to plain Torpedo.

Its goaltending school, associated with Evgeni Nabokov, has sent players as far as the NHL — Nabokov himself, Nik Antropov, Anton Khudobin among them. Against Saryarka, the fixture known in Kazakhstan as the derby, and against Barys, that pipeline of players remains the club's clearest claim on the present.