Chekhovskiye Medvedi

Handball changed that. Since the club took the town's name, Chekhov has been known in European handball circles as the home of one of the sport's most dominant sides of the past two decades.

The team did not start from nothing. It grew out of the old CSKA Moscow handball section, which had already merged with SportAkademClub before the renamed club, Chekhovskiye Medvedi, was registered in December 2001.

That record has been extraordinary by any domestic measure. Chekhovskiye Medvedi won the Russian Superleague every year from 2002 to 2022, a run of twenty-one straight titles that left little room for any rival to build a tradition of its own. Domestic cups and super cups followed in similar volume. In Europe the club's high point came in 2006, when it beat Valladolid to win the EHF Cup Winners' Cup, and again in 2010, when it reached the Champions League Final Four and finished fourth.

Matches are played at the Olimpiysky Sport Palace on Polygrafistov Street, where the purple and white colours that gave the team its Russian nickname, Fioletovo-belye, fill a hall of a few thousand seats. It is a modest setting for a club whose trophy count outstrips most of the sport's better-known European names, and it is where the Bears still return after every title, back to the town whose name they carry into competitions few in Chekhov could have imagined reaching before December 2001.