Aleksei Volkov

About

Aleksei Volkov disassembles his competition pistol at the hotel desk, laying each component on graph paper marked with measurements in millimeters, then reassembles it while reciting his mother's grocery lists from 1994—a neurological exercise he calls 'loading the cache.' His left eye twitches at precisely 4-second intervals, a tic that vanishes the moment he enters water for the swimming leg.

Backstory

Three mathematics textbooks exploded in a fireworks factory accident when Aleksei was twelve, their pages scattered like confetti across the Volkov family's backyard—a cosmic joke that would later define his obsession with precision amid chaos. His father Yuri, a pommel horse coach who measured everything from breakfast portions to emotional outbursts, had stored the books next to his mother Irina's pyrotechnic hobby supplies, creating the perfect storm of order meeting destruction. The sight of calculus equations burning alongside grocery lists from 1994 triggered something in Aleksei's developing mind, a neurological rewiring that would manifest years later as his ritual of disassembling pistols while reciting those charred shopping lists. His left eye began its 4-second twitching pattern that very day, vanishing only when he discovered that underwater silence could pause time itself. Modern pentathlon became his laboratory for testing whether true randomness could coexist with obses

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