Avanhard (Vanguard)

Avanhard (Vanguard). A sports association founded in 1957 in Soviet Ukraine for members of industrial trade unions. It had over 3,000 sections and clubs and 2 million members engaged in various forms of sport. The soccer teams Metalurh from Zaporizhia, Zoria from Luhansk, Stal from Dnipropetrovsk, and Sudnobudivnyk from Mykolaiv, and the Kyiv basketball team Budivelnyk were among the better known teams in the USSR. From the ranks of Avanhard have come a number of Olympic, world, and European champions.