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There were plenty of guys on the planet who would’ve killed to get the chance to be in a relationship with Anna Kournikova when the Russian tennis player took the world by storm around the turn of the millennium—and there were a couple of NHL players who claimed they each managed to do that at the same time to treat us to a love triangle that’s still as strange as it was back in the day.
Kournikova was only 14 years old when she made her debut on the WTA Tour, and while she never came close to being the most dominant player on the planet, she peaked at No. 8 in the singles world rankings in 2000 and earned a couple of Grand Slam doubles titles while playing alongside the legendary Martina Hingis.
Her skills on the court obviously put her on the map in the first place, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why Kournikova was incredibly popular with many men who kept tabs on her career for reasons that didn’t really have much to do with how she fared on the tennis court.
That apparently included Sergei Fedorov and Pavel Bure, a couple of fellow Russian natives who made a name for themselves in the NHL. While that league doesn’t tend to spawn a ton of drama stemming from the love lives of its players, we were treated to a very notable exception thanks to the saga the trio found themselves at the center of.
Sergi Fedorov and Pavel Bure were both linked to romantic relationships with Anna Kournikova at the same time
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Fedorov resided in Russia until he defected to the United States to join the Red Wings in 1990 to kick off a legendary NHL career where he won three Stanley Cups and ended up enshrined in the Hockey Hall of Fame.
Bure took a similar path to the NHL, as he was teammates with Fedorov on CSKA Moscow and made his debut with the Canucks in 1991 following a lengthy legal battle concerning his eligibility (Detroit had also hoped to draft the man eventually dubbed “The Russian Rocket” but was ultimately outfoxed by Vancouver).
The duo never played alongside each other in the NHL, but they did reunite on the ice in 1998 while representing Russia at the Winter Olympics in Nagano (where they secured a silver medal after losing to the Czech Republic in the championship game) and also won a bronze in 2002.
Based on stories that surfaced after the love triangle in question ran its course, Fedorov and Kournikova got engaged in 1999 when she was 18 years old (which would imply Sergi—who is more than 11 years her senior—began courting her before she reached that age; it’s believed they first met when she was 15).
If you put stock in what the tabloids had to say, Kournikova was romantically linked to Bure the very same year (he was “only” ten years older than the teenager). At the time, Fedorov’s engagement with the tennis star hadn’t been made public, but you have to imagine he was less than thrilled to hear Bure had supposedly proposed to her at a restaurant in Florida in 2000 (the winger was hesitant to confirm the news at the time but also didn’t deny it outright).
Both Fedorov and Bure were spotted in the stands watching Kournikova play at various tennis tournaments. She repeatedly headed to Sunshine, Florida to watch Pavel do his thing for the Panthers, and there’s a photo that proves she was in the building to celebrate with Sergei after the Red Wings won the Stanley Cup in 1997.
However, things took yet another turn when a new man entered the picture in 2001: Enrique Iglesias. That year, she and the singer treated the world to one of the hardest launches imaginable courtesy of a video featuring the two of them making out and getting hot and heavy in multiple locations.
While the duo never officially tied the knot, they’ve been together ever since and have brought three kids into the world over the course of a relationship spanning more than two decades.
In 2003, Fedorov revealed he and Kournikova had gotten a divorce, although it’s unclear when he and Kournikova were married in the first place (in 2001, her representative denied they’d made things official after a report surfaced claiming they’d done exactly that).
Bure eventually married Russian model Alina Khasanova in 2008, while Fedorov was linked with actress Tara Reid shortly after his split with Kournikova and eventually settled down with a woman named Corrina.