VLADIMIR PUTIN
ARCHIVE OF THE OFFICIAL SITE
OF THE 2008-2012 PRIME MINISTER
OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION
VLADIMIR PUTIN
ARCHIVE OF THE OFFICIAL SITE
OF THE 2008-2012 PRIME MINISTER
OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION
VLADIMIR PUTIN
Prime Minister Putin's introductory remarks:
Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen,
We all know the sacred saying, "Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan." But I have another well-known saying on my mind that I have to share: "How could it come to this?"
Millions of fans had such high expectations for our national Olympic team. They could hardly believe that we finished in 11th place in Vancouver. Everyone is rightly wondering how this could have happened.
As you know, I travel extensively throughout Russia. The economy is not in the best shape right now. The recession is not over yet, and unemployment has inched upward recently. Still, every question I hear is about sports and the Olympics. People don't ask about wages or the economy anymore. Wherever I go, the first question I'm asked is about the Vancouver Olympics. People want to know what happened.
In the early and mid-1990s Russia opened up to the world, and our top-notch specialists gained access to international labour markets, including sports markets. Highly skilled people tend to move to where they can find a better outlet for their abilities. Many people have moved abroad, and for this they cannot be blamed.
In addition, hardly anything was invested in our sports infrastructure during that time, and much of the Soviet infrastructure had become worn out. This cannot be disputed. It's obvious, and it continues to have a negative effect on sports in our country.
That being said, we have not neglected sports over the past eight or ten years. In fact, we have spent serious money on sports, which resulted in some striking and notable achievements.
However, there is now a growing sense that the more we spend, the less we have to show for it.
Almost 3.5 billion roubles were spent to prepare our national team for the Vancouver Olympics between 2006 and 2009. And this is just the money from the federal budget. There were other sources of funding as well. We spent five times more preparing for the Vancouver Olympics than the Olympics in Turin, which is comparable to what was spent on the teams that led the medal count in Vancouver.
The question arises: Was the money that we invested, or rather allocated, spent as it was supposed to be, or was it spent the way the people in charge of the money wanted it to be? We need to take a deeper look at this issue.
In addition, our team hasn't managed to become truly competitive in the sports that were added to the Olympics relatively recently, and we failed to maintain our position in the sports we have traditionally dominated in.
Bad luck cannot explain everything. Sports are sports, of course, and luck certainly plays a role. But we must determine the actual causes of our failures, make our conclusions, and fix the problems. Attempts to explain away our defeats as a result of biased judging, capricious weather and scheming against our team are irrelevant. This is what losers do.
We must start with a review of our efforts to determine whether we did everything we could for our athletes, whether the people responsible for helping them truly gave it their all.
I hope we can avoid generalities at today's meeting. We must thoroughly and honestly analyse the situation and, more importantly, outline practical steps to improve it.
The first issue I would like to draw your attention to is the obvious, systemic problems we have managing elite sports. This may be the result of the limited authority of our sports federations. I would like to hear more about this today and for you to formulate the problem precisely. Or maybe they lack a sense of responsibility? The federations' work should be transparent and more open to the public, so that they can see who is responsible for what.
The federations need to be led by people who take their work seriously, who see it as in the focus of their life. They must give their full attention to their work.
The Sports Ministry, in turn, must do more than distribute funds. And once it distributes the funds, it must actively participate in programmes to prepare and train athletes and have a vote in key issues such as appointing coaches.
I also think that each federation should have a step-by-step plan of action that is both transparent and goal-oriented. This would provide an opportunity to see what the goals and objectives of a federation are as well as the policies and resources aimed at meeting these goals. In this way we can check at certain times whether a certain goal has been met. The plans should be very specific, not general.
Moving on. Additional steps need to be taken to train coaches and to choose and foster new athletes. We have developed a policy that will provide financial incentives to our athletes, but it is more important to find promising athletes in the first place.
Vancouver has shown us that we don't have enough internal competition in certain sport in Russia. We don't have strong benches, and in some cases we don't have a bench at all. We need to take all the best ideas from the Soviet training system and combine them with modern international methods. As you know, our foreign partners have learned a lot from Russia. The time may have come to take a page from their playbook.
Russia's regions must also have a greater role in training our Olympic reserve team. Fifty regions have already adopted their own sports programmes; others must follow suit as soon as possible. It is usually grassroots sports that pave the way for serious achievements.
Third, gifted young athletes should be given open access to elite sports. Admittedly, the Russian Olympic team was predominately young. Some of my colleagues remarked shortly before the Olympics that we were taking a "peewee" team to Vancouver. I disagree, but there were certainly many young athletes on the team.
In 2009, about 200 government-funded sports facilities were opened. We need to continue to improve our sports infrastructure at all levels, from community sports fields to major stadiums.
We need cutting-edge training facilities for athletes in all sports without exception. Let me repeat that - all sports without exception, including the new categories.
Also, we need to revise the payment system for coaches and specialists working with our national team. We have created a fund with the help of major companies that will provide substantial funds to support our leading national athletes and specialists. We will need to keep an eye on how it works and where the money goes. Ideally, every leading athlete should be paid a substantial monthly allowance. Let me repeat that: every leading athlete. We need to make sure that this is being done.
We may also create a special system for awarding government grants. We have already done this in the arts. It is very effective, and it does not cost the country much. This could be arranged.
All the athletes need financially security. Sufficient financing should be arranged for the entire duration of an athlete's preparation and training; the size of the allowance should also depend on the athlete's results at each stage.
I have already mentioned the importance of technical, scientific and medical support for the athletes. All the recent advances should be applied here, while keeping in mind that honest competition and drug use are incompatible. In Vancouver, the Russian team gave us no cause to doubt its strict adherence to this rule. Let's keep it that way going forward.
All these policies are spelled out in our Strategy for the Development of Physical Fitness and Sports, and they are to be followed to the letter.
There is another important point I would like to make. After our unimpressive showing in Vancouver, I've heard people say that we will prepare for the Sochi Olympics, but being a top medal winner should not be a priority; a good showing is good enough. I do not share this view. One does not compete at this level to sweat; one competes to win. Millions of fans in Russia expect our team to win. In Sochi, our team must be among the leaders.
Sochi is our national project, and we will give it our undivided attention, which includes training new athletes to represent Russia in 2014.
And finally, despite the modest results in Vancouver, the majority of our athletes gave it their all. True fans will never turn on their team. And true winners always learn something from their defeats. They don't give up. They work even harder so that next time they win.
That being said, we have a number of athletes who fought hard and won the medals they deserved. We are proud of them and hope to see even greater achievements in the future.
Let's get down to work.
