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KenitohMenara · 05-08-2019, 10:45 AM

(First Article - x2 bonus)

The story of Raphael d’Alcott

It is said that we are all authors or our own life stories. Some are triumphs while others are tragedies. Some collect dust while others become best sellers. Like most, Raphael d’Alcott’s story has its ups and downs, but in the end, his story is one of survival. A story of conquering odds and adapting to new environments. A story of becoming a international sensation after experience the greatest heartbreak.

His journey to his first game in the SMJHL has been fraught with perils and struggles. As he joins the Anchorage Amada and play his first game in SMJHL, he shares his story with us and shows us how it has moulded this young man into a future star.

Part 1 – The Escape

Our story begins in the former Soviet Union, in the country of Georgia. A 24 year old woman has just given birth in the capital of Tbilisi. The boy’s face is pure and innocent, a mop of golden hair on his head and beautiful blue eyes. One of the nurses casually said he looked like an angel. For some a completely innocuous statement, something you would say about baby just born, but for a deeply devout woman like Tamari Razmadze, it was a sign of what she would name her child…. Raphael Razmadze.

From the most tender age, Raphael clearly showed a fondness for ice skating and hockey. Georgia did not have a grand tradition of ice hockey, with many efforts to try making the sport more popular often failing due to circumstances. Raphael turned to Georgia’s neighbors to the north, Russia, for inspiration and found the KHL and found inspiration on what he wanted to do. Inspired by the performances of his favourite team, Avangard Omsk, he started skating anywhere he could in order to practice. Without anyone to teach him, the first few months were rough and injuries were commonplace as he tried (and often failed) to find rhythm with his skates. It seemed like an would be an unconquerable step until Raphael’s father, Giorgi Razmadze gave him the most important advice he would ever receive. Raphael was not like the KHL stars that he adored, he was his own person and would have to find his own style of skating in order to get to where he was going. Such simple words yet they meant the world to Raphael and he started putting them to practice.

Soon videos of him skating, often recorded by his parents, started surfacing on the internet and attracted some foreign attention. This young child from Georgia, no older than 5 at the time, was skating with incredible speed for his age. Sure his style was clunky and his fundamentals were off but the fact that Raphael had taught himself to skate was remarkable to many people. One fact that drew attention as well was his clothing. He didn’t have a proper jersey but it was clear how much he loved Avangard. The KHL team stumbled upon the videos and made a special plan for the boys 6th birthday. Raphael would wake up that to see a special package written in Russian. He tore it open to reveal an official Avangard Omsk jersey with his name on it and the number 97. To this day, Raphael still holds on to that jersey and credits it as the moment where he discovered his number and what he wanted to do with his life. He wanted to one day journey to Russia, to play in the KHL with his beloved team and win the Gagarin Cup. Unfortunately, he would never get that chance.

Russia and Georgia had never been the closest of neighbors. Ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, that had always be a contentious relationship between the two nations. Couple this with the fact that Giorgi Razmadze had been a Georgian separatist in his youth (with a criminal record in Russia) and the videos that had once been a blessing had become a curse on the family. With the potential of arrest and seizure coming, Giorgi and Tamari a difficult choice. One night, communication had reached them that junior teams in France had taken interest in Raphael from his videos and that if an opportunity presented itself, they would want to bring him in order to train and play. For the sake of their son’s future, Giorgi and Tamari agreed with the french communicators and the 7 year old child, carrying one suitcase and tears in his eyes, gave his parents one final hug before leaving.

To this day, Raphael has not been back to Georgia and told this reporter that he came dangerously close to throwing away his Avangard Jersey… but everytime he came close to, he found he couldn’t do it. It wasn’t Avangard’s fault what happened and they were the team who truly inspired him to play, he couldn’t turn his back on them. He also says that, if it weren’t for this moment in time, he wouldn’t have become the player he is today.

Part 2 - New life and home

Raphael landed in Nice to meet up with his future team and coaches. Raphael spoke very little french so he learned sign language in order to communicate with his teachers while he played. Everything was so much different in France for Raphael. The food, the people, the language and importantly, the hockey, was all totally different from how Raphael had lived his life. He struggled mightily when he started playing in France, trying desperately to keep up with the other french kids who seemed faster and more skilled than him. Their technique was more fluid and they exposed Raphael’s flaws, to the point of frustration in a lot of instances.

The french coaches knew what they were doing, they were making Raphael as uncomfortable as possible. They knew how much talent he had, the incredibly skill ceiling that this child had but before they could do anything with that, they needed to break down what Raphael had built for himself. The techniques he had scrapped by with would not do him any good and now that he was on official ice and receiving instruction, everything needed to be learned from scratch. Raphael told us that these were his darkest days; he had lost his home and his family all at once, he had moved to a foreign country where he didn’t speak the language and now the one thing that had always made him happy, Ice Hockey, felt like it was being taken away. Luckily for Raphael, he found support from an unlikely (at least to him) source. The kids he skated alongside. Whether they saw what the coaches saw in Raphael or simply being friendly teammates is unclear, but the fellow skaters on the youth team pushed Raphael on to be at his best, defending him from coach critiques and helping him learn French, even going so far as to helping him out with school work at the local school where Raphael was a student. They didn’t have to do a thing other than be his team-mates, but their actions and welcoming nature gave Raphael hope that he could break through the barriers that the coaches had placed in front of him. This team had welcomed him with open arms and now it was time to prove why they did.

During their first game of the season, things clicked and Raphael began to show the incredible potential he had, scoring 5 points in his first game and taking home first star honours. The moment the first goal hit the net, the rush Raphael felt was the greatest of his life. He wanted to hold onto that feeling and never forget how good it felt to score and win. Game after game, Raphael would continue to develop into a junior phenomenon, showing that his coaches were right in taking a risk on the boy from Tbilisi. His coaches took over responsibility of recording videos and they started garner further interest from outside forces, even leading to television interviews on French TV which led to an infamous nickname. During the interview, one of the presenters referred to Raphael as “The Georgian Grenade” and the name stuck, with his teammates and his friends referring to him as that. These days in France were a happy time and now Raphael’s ambitions had changed. While he still held his beloved Avangard Omsk in high regard, he no longer wanted to play in the KHL. Instead his eyes were set on something grander. The SHL and the Challenge Cup. It was the richest hockey prize in the world and those who won it were remembered for all time. Raphael wanted that and started to train harder to reach it. Little did he know that soon he would his greatest chance to date.

Part 3 - The Reborn Prodigy

After his first season in france, Raphael’s name was getting international press. Despite his age, he was starting to receive serious prospect reports. They commented on his incredible turn around in france, how he compared to other child stars but one question kept cropping up:

“How far can he truly go?”

There was no doubt that Raphael was exceptionally talented and scouts found it astonishing how this kid from Georgia could grasp ice hockey in a way few could at his age. The question was if he could keep it going, if he could translate to bigger leagues. France was not exactly setting the world on fire in major ice hockey tournaments. If Raphael had gone to Sweden, Germany, Finland, the scouts believed he would have a better chance at succeeding at higher levels. These reports initially appalled Raphael, making him think that they didn’t know the circumstances behind his move but eventually, he settled on just being angry and more determined to prove all these analysts wrong. Then one day, he received some unlikely help.

Considering he was still without a family, Raphael had been up for adoption in France for over a year. The mass media attention drew in a lot of onlookers which translated into one particular adoption request. A canadian couple, the d’Alcotts living out in Toronto wanted to adopt the junior phenom, giving detailed reasons as to why and how they would help Raphael’s development in hockey. After the couple, Raphael’s trainers and the french authorities met, an agreement was reached and Raphael once again changed nationalities and homes.

At first he was suspicious of his new parents. He wasn’t blind to how his mass media attention had attracted plenty of weird offers from couples that simply wanted him for his tiny amount of fame. The d’Alcotts, however, quickly dashed away his fears by showing him their home (he told us that his room even have an autographed team picture of Avangard for good measure), the local rinks he could skate on and teams he could try out for but also the Hockey hall of fame. It was here where Raphael truly understood the legacy of hockey, how the game had evolved and why it meant so much to so many, including his new parents who were dyed in the wool hockey fans. He had always wanted nothing more than to make it big in hockey, but now seeing all of this was enough for Raphael to make it his ultimate goal in life. He had come too far and worked too hard for him not to become a star in hockey. This was what he was meant to do, it was what he was bred to do and he would make it come true.

Raphael’s dominance at junior levels continued, thanks to his new canadian coaches and his proximity to local rinks for practice. He trained harder as his body grew taller and he worked to the point of obsession. Every analyst that had questioned his drive and his training soon were shut up by his numbers. While having to miss the SMJHL draft due to various circumstances, Raphael was one of the hottest FA’s during the season and eventually agreed to a contract with the Anchorage Armada, his next step finally achieved.

Despite all his success and achievements, Raphael still remains the humbled boy from Tbilisi that wants to play hockey on the sports grandest stage. He cites numerous people as those who kept him going in the hardest times, his parents (and adoptive parents), his french coaches and team-mates and every person who had ever watched one of his videos online that turned him into a star. As he skates off to Anchorage to try and help the Armada win SMJHL titles, one can only look back at his body of work so far and wonder what the next chapter of the story will read like. Maybe it will be one of ultimate triumph, maybe one of ultimate tragedy. Nothing is certain but one thing is clear. Raphael has held many names over his short life:

Raphael Razmadze
The Georgian Grenade
The Junior French Phenom

For Raphael there is one name he wants to add in his life:

SHL Challenge Cup Champion

**(2194 Words)**

(First Article - x2 bonus)