News Story – Oleg Markov, The Belarusian boy taking the AFL world by storm.

Oleg Markov is a 20-year-old Belarusian born AFL player, currently playing for the Richmond Football Club. Oleg is the eldest son of parents Valentia and Dmitri who moved to Australia in 1997 when he was only one from their hometown of Belarus, located to the west of Russia. His father Dmitri Markov, holds many pole-vaulting accolades, but none more impressive than claiming the title as world champion in 2001. Dmitri chose to move to Australia to pursue an athletics sponsorship at the South Australian Sports Institute, but to also seek a better life for his one-year-old son and family.
Oleg was brought up in a household with a strong Russian culture, as he said …show more content…
It ultimately lead to me changing the overall focus of the story as I was unable to contact the desired players I wanted to. They weren’t particularly enthusiastic to converse with a journalism student, even when claimed to be writing an article on behalf of On The Record. Even when I condensed the focus of my story, contacting Oleg was more difficult than I expected even with his personal phone number, as AFL players have an extremely busy schedule during the AFL season. We were eventually able to conduct a phone call interview at 8pm on a Thursday night where I was able to ask him a range of questions. Another difficulty I was required to overcome was interviewing Oleg’s parents Valencia and Dmitri, the problem wasn’t gaining an interview it was the slight language barrier which proved to be the issue. They spoke English quite well considering it is their second language but I required their youngest son Tony to translate a few of the more complex questions. Typically for a feature story on a prominent figure journalists have more than 400 words to summarise their findings including background information and interviews therefore I found it hard to condense the abundant amount of information I gathered from both Oleg and his