QUEST FOR ACCEPTANCE
NIKOLAI VALUEV was born in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) on August 21, 1973. A massive giant of biblical proportions, he stands 7-feet-2-inches tall and weighs over 300 pounds. His size is accentuated by a protruding forehead with large bumps (frontal bossing) that are a normal part of his brow but look as though they were raised by blows. Everything in his life has been shadowed by his size.
Valuev came from a working-class family. Both of his parents were 5-feet-5-inches tall. But his grandmother told him that his great-great-grandfather was “a giant of a man” named Vasily and a direct descendant of the Tartars (a Mongolian tribe that overran parts of Asia and Europe in the 13th century).
At age 13, Valuev was sent to a boarding school that specialised in sports. Soon, he was playing on a team that won a junior-level national basketball championship. Then his interests broadened to include track and field. At 19, he won a national junior title in the discus and was invited to attend the Institute of Sport in Leningrad with an eye toward competing in the 1996 Olympics. At the institute, he caught the eye of a boxing trainer named Oleg Shalaev.
Valuev was 20 when he took up boxing.
“At first, it was very hard for me,” he later recalled. “Most boxers begin at a much younger age, and everything was new to me. I had never thrown a punch
