When I came across this picture of Jean-Claude Van Damme hugging Fedor Emelianenko on CagePotato's It's BFF Friday!!! post I just could not stop laughing at Van Damme's face expression.  There are more pictures there, as well as a video of JCVD hugging Fedor at Yarenokka. FightLinker wrote about that episode as well here. It just didn't strike me then cause he had an animated gif of it and I didn't bother waiting for it to load.

I know how creepy this looks....and how creepy it is.... and felt I had to explain why Fedor is tolerating this bizarre behavior from Van Damme.

Thing people don’t understand is that in Eastern Europe most of the Western actions stars like Arnold, Stallone and VanDamme were way more popular than they ever were in the West. You could say it was just the right timing when Russia opened up to Western movies and VHS. There was nothing like that in the Soviet cinema at the time. Martial Arts besides Judo and Sambo were banned to practice. And those two weren’t highly televised or promoted.

Picture this, here you are in Russia at the end of Soviet era being fed non stop World War II movies on TV ala Saving Private Ryan. That was the only theme of all the action movies...well, wait..sometimes there were Russian Revolution and the Civil War movies too.

Enter VHS players. They cost a bunch and the only movies on VHS were of course from US and Hong Kong.  So the new Russian entrepreneurs put their newly acquired VHS players in little halls and basements with a bunch of chairs and charged an equivalent of 10 dollars to watch a movie on a 20 inch TV at best.

Enter Blood Sport with Jean Claude Van Damme. High spin kicking and splits doing action star doing things that most impressionable Russian youth at the time have never ever seen amounted to him becoming a huge idol and inspiration for training for many many fighters, including Fedor and CroCop.  I mean you had everyone trying to do the splits while trying to punch someone in the groin, doing splits between chairs, holding their legs up high and etc. 

Anyways, Fedor is only tolerating it cause hugging is more accepted over there and it’s VanDamme from the movies, not the creep he is in real life. I mean, from the Fedor interview I translated recently he was glad Jean Claude was there for his Hong Man Choi fight:

FEDOR: I'm very glad that the guys came to support me...Jean Claude...

But yeah…weird doesn’t even begin to describe VanDamme’s sad infatuation with Fedor and traveling to Japan to hug and kiss….