In the Spotlight: Marat Safin

This week, the tabloids have been concentrating on stars’ love lives in the post-New Year lull.

A sultry blonde discussed her romance with tennis player Marat Safin, while a tabloid spilled the dirt on an attractive brunette and her child, who may or may not be Safin’s daughter.

Meanwhile the awe-inspiringly huge boxer Nikolai Valuyev talked to 7 Dnei magazine about his extremely cozy family life. He revealed that he spent years living in a tiny “odnushka” studio apartment — together with his wife Galina and their son.

The week’s best story involved It-girl Ksenia Sobchak. On Thursday she lost a court case against Olga Rodionova, a woman who — how should I phrase this? — enjoys being photographed without too many clothes on, as well as showing off pieces of metal stuck in unusual places.

Rodionova, wife of magazine publisher Sergei Rodionov, has already sued The Sunday Times after it wrote that she made “soft-core porn” — and she won.

This time, she objected to Sobchak’s derogatory comments about her “The Book of Olga,” an album of photographs taken by French artist Bettina Rheims that featured erotic shots of Rodionova.  

Sobchak presented Rodionova with a spoof prize for being “Naked and Funny” — in absentia. She also wrote a Tatler column about the book, saying that “you could count the number of sapphires and emeralds in her vaginal piercing.”

It’s nice to have something in common with an It-girl. Last summer, I also received a letter from Rodionova’s lawyer after I wrote about the cat fight between her and Sobchak. Rather charmingly, Rodionova didn’t mind my mentions of her vaginal piercings. What bothered her was that I used the word “obscure” to describe two television channels where she hosts shows, although the dispute didn’t go any further.

This week’s court case focused on a coarsely phrased comment from Sobchak about Rodionova’s complaints that: “If you’re being shitted on, you have to wait for it to trickle off,” Express Gazeta reported.

The judge ruled that Sobchak should pay Rodionova a slim 20,000 rubles ($672), although she had asked for 1 million rubles.

Also in the tabloids this week was tennis player Safin, described as “the sexiest man in Russia” by at least one female reporter. The Tvoi Den scoop was to find a woman who may or may not have had a daughter with him. The “businesswoman,” called Valeria, is bringing up Safin’s 5-year-old daughter, Yeva, and the father accepts his child, the newspaper wrote. But it didn’t give much more detail — possibly because it mentions that Valeria recently got married to a lawyer.

Zhara magazine printed Safin’s impressive list of conquests, including Dasha Zhukova, now the mother of Roman Abramovich’s child, as well as a couple of models, an actress and two pop singers — all but Zhukova with long blonde hair.

In another sports-related story, giant boxer Valuyev showed 7 Dnei magazine round his apartment outside St. Petersburg and revealed that while fans assumed that he was rich, he spent years squeezed into a studio apartment.

The boxer’s financial situation was once so bad that his hapless manager offered him a job as a night security guard, and they used to have to borrow money from a kindly neighbor, his wife said.

Valuyev once beat up a parking attendant for being rude to his petite dark-haired wife — before the boxer loomed into view, naturally. And he sounds like a loyal family man, together with Galina for 12 years.

Even now the family lives modestly, the boxer said. “I read that Valuyev lives in an elite district and was very surprised,” he commented dryly. “Our elite district doesn’t have any sidewalks.”