Here's one for the pub quiz, and it lands unusually close to home. The sprinter once billed as the fastest white man on the planet was born on this day in 1968, not in Sofia or Plovdiv, but in Razgrad, roughly 45 minutes up the road from Shumen. I've lived here 13 years and I only properly discovered him while researching this piece, which says something about how quietly Bulgaria files away its sporting heroes.
What happened on this day
Nikolay Antonov (Nikolay Antonov Yakimov in full) was born in Razgrad on 17 August 1968, and he was quick from the start. As a junior he set national age-group records that still read well today: 20.88 seconds for the 200m in Linz in 1986, and 21.46 indoors in Genoa the following year. By his early twenties he was collecting senior medals across the continent.
The indoor circuit is where he made his name. Silver in Budapest in 1988, silver in Glasgow in 1990, then the big double: world indoor champion in Seville in 1991 and European indoor champion in Genoa in 1992, that Genoa mark of 20.41 still the Bulgarian indoor record. Quite the medal haul for a lad from the Ludogorie, and British readers will like that one of those silvers was won in Glasgow, on our patch.
His defining race came outdoors. At the 1991 world championships in Tokyo he ran 20.20 seconds on 26 August, a Bulgarian record that still stands 35 years on, and went on to finish seventh in a final where he was the only white athlete on the start line. That is what earned him the nickname that stuck: the fastest white man on the planet. His time is still third on the all-time Balkan list, behind the Greeks Konstantinos Kenteris and Anastasios Gousis, which puts it into perspective somewhat.
And then there is the result I keep coming back to. In March 1992, at an indoor meeting in San Sebastian, Antonov beat Carl Lewis over 200m, 20.51 to 20.75. Let that sink in: one of the biggest names athletics has ever produced, beaten by a lad from Razgrad. The same year he also got the better of the world record holder Bruno Marie-Rose indoors, and at the Barcelona Olympics he reached the 200m semi-final, clocking 20.55.
In 1993 he switched to the long jump, as you do when you have already beaten Carl Lewis, and within a year he was genuinely good at that too: 8.21 metres in Plovdiv in July 1994, still fifth on the Bulgarian all-time list behind Ivaylo Mladenov, Atanas Atanasov, Nikolay Atanasov and Petar Dachev.
The post-communist letdown
Here the story stops reading like a sports biography. Antonov retired, went home to Razgrad and largely dropped from public view. In 2003 he attempted suicide, and the Bulgarian record notes his severe financial situation as the likely cause. The state sports machine that had built him, housed him and celebrated him had vanished with the old regime, and a whole generation of champions discovered their medals came with no pension attached. The Bulgarian Wikipedia entry offers no further detail, leaving it one of those quietly bleak postscripts of the transition years. He is still with us, still in Razgrad, and today he turns 58.
Why this matters for British expats
Razgrad is the next city along the Ludogorie plateau from us, and if British expats know it at all it is usually as the home of Ludogorets, the football club that won fourteen consecutive Bulgarian league titles and turned up in the Champions League. Today's birthday gives you the better story to tell: world-class sprinting came out of the same plateau as Shumen, and a man from just up the road once outran Carl Lewis. When a Bulgarian friend mentions the fastest white man, this is who they mean.
It is also a small window on how Bulgarians remember the 1990s. Antonov's arc, glory funded by the state followed by abandonment by it, is the transition era in miniature, and it explains some of the ambivalence you will hear when older Bulgarians compare then and now. This is the cultural literacy that turns living in Bulgaria into understanding it.
Sources and further reading
Antonov's times, medals and life story draw on his Bulgarian Wikipedia biography and the English Wikipedia entry, with the town background from Wikipedia's Razgrad page.