Viktor Tikhonov led the Soviet Union to the gold medal in men’s ice hockey at the 1984 Winter Olympics.
The tournament was held in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet team finished first in the six-team final round. The USSR went unbeaten, winning five games and tying one, and collected its sixth Olympic men’s ice hockey gold medal. Tikhonov was the team’s head coach.
The victory was a major rebound after the Soviet Union’s shocking semifinal defeat to the United States at the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics. Tikhonov had already built the powerful CSKA Moscow–based system that supplied much of the national team, emphasizing conditioning, coordinated passing, positional discipline, and relentless skating.
The question asks for the coach, not the team’s most famous players. Slava Fetisov was the Soviet captain and a star defenseman, while Vladimir Yurzinov and Anatoly Tarasov were influential Soviet hockey coaches in other periods. Tikhonov later coached the Soviet team to another Olympic gold at Calgary in 1988.