Interesting and unusual story. The blog is referring to a biography by Ben Macintyre from 2014,
A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal. Apparently there is also a Russian biography of Kim Philby that was published in 2012 and has seen two subsequent re-editions. The author is well-known journalist Nikolai Dolgopolov (who actually started as sports journalist and has been the president of the Russian figure skating federation since 1998).
Now here's one of the quotes from Macintyre's book from the blog:
He did odd jobs for the Soviet state, including training KGB recruits and helping to motivate the Soviet hockey team — even though, as [his former friend, the MI6 intelligence officer Nicholas] Elliott once noted, he was addicted to cricket and “showed no interest whatsoever in any other sort of sport.”
I don't have Dolgopolov's book, but prior to publishing it he wrote an article about his research in the newspaper
Krasnaya zvezda (December 2011). In this article (available online
here, all in Russian), he cites an interview with Philby's widow
Rufina Ivanovna Pukhova. Answering Dolgopolov's question whether it's true that Kim Philby was a hockey fan in Russia, she said:
Like football, he never missed hockey. He usually watched it on TV. Sometimes he also visited the stadium. Indeed, he was particularly fond of hockey. Together with [television announcer] Nikolai Ozerov, he shouted deafeningly: "Goal! Goal!" He was a desperate fan.
Then Dolgopolov says he had seen a photo of Philby with the Dinamo team and the familiar faces of Vladimir Yurzinov, Valeri Vasilyev and Alexander Maltsev. Pukhova replied:
Back then he went to their training base in Novogorsk. Kim himself was very athletic. In his youth at Cambridge he was a swimming champion. He played football [soccer], rugby and boxed.
Another find: On the website of the
Russian Foreign Intelligence Service there is an interview about Philby with a retired major general, Viktor Budanov. He says that Philby once asked him for jerseys (soccer or hockey?) of Dinamo Moscow when he was visited by his daugther and her two children from England. Budanov asked him why. Philby replied they were for his grandchildren and he wanted Dinamo Moscow to be represented in England.