He likes his job as Prime Minister.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin met with the medal winners of the national Spartakiad for school students yesterday. He promised to preserve the CSKA sports club and answered the question about the relative difficulty of being President of Russia versus being the Prime Minister. With the details of the visit to the Olympic Reserve School is our correspondent ANDRE KOLESNIKOV.
A meeting with the medal winners of the national school games took place at the Olympic Reserve School. The facility is full of the latest technology. An anti-doping centre is located in the lounge on the ground floor. Its glass shelves contain the winner's cups for various grades and a pamphlet entitled "The Influence of Marijuana on Sports Results and the Athlete's Health." It seems to hammer home the idea that without the use of marijuana none of the holders of these cups would have won them.
There is an assortment of biological additives that athletes use. Though none of them are banned, the list is so long it creates the impression that the athletes taking them are walking on the edge.
"We should not base our anti-doping programme on punishment alone," says Director of the Innovative Sports Technologies Centre, David Chichua, and the Russian biathletes who have been punished by the international anti-doping organisations would have appreciated hearing that. "They must have adequate pharmacological support."
In other words, those responsible for supporting athletes should offer them drugs that cannot be detected. And that requires a lot of research.
The school's small building also houses a "rowing bath." Athletes work the oars while remaining seated.
The school has a sports test laboratory. I saw a cyclist in a glass cube gasping for air. The air in the cube is rarefied to simulate the conditions at an elevation of more than 2000 m. Oxygen is siphoned out of the cube little by little. A technician proudly demonstrated that a cigarette lighter will not light inside it. It worked perfectly well outside the cube. Throughout this presentation the cyclist pushed the pedals furiously and as I was leaving the room his face looked like there was no oxygen left in the cube at all.
The head of the sports testing centre, Irina Radchich, also demonstrated how specialists can remove "the athlete's subconscious stress." The athlete may not suspect that he is tense but experts are already working to relieve the tension as measured by simple tests. The athlete is offered a choice of several words which he reads and tries to understand while sensitive instruments register his reaction. The words might include "illness", "wife", "graveyard", "father", "wimp", "sex"... The mere enumeration (even without understanding the meaning) seems to me to transform subconscious tension into conscious tension, which is apparently what is needed in order to then remove the tension by using some state-of-the-art technology.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin looked at all these novelties when he visited the centre. He chose not to submit himself to any of these tests, which characterises him as a person who has decided to leave his subconscious stress alone. Subconscious tension would be a good description for the state of the winners of the national school games who were sitting in the gym waiting for the Prime Minister.
Tension picked up visibly when he arrived. Young athletes, most of whom were aged 15-16, looked as if it would be easier for them to win the games than to bring themselves to ask a question of Vladimir Putin. But they tried very hard to overcome their shyness. Lyuda, the women's hockey captain, asked him why so little attention was paid to women's hockey. She said that there were only five teams in the Russian championship and Moscow did not even have one. She asked the Prime Minister to organise a trip to North America for the top athletes to gain experience.
"Sit down, Lyuda," the Prime Minister said. "How long have you been playing hockey?"
"Seven years," replied the girl who looked only slightly older than seven.
"How long has women's hockey been cultivated in our country?" the Prime Minister asked.
"Not very long," Lyuda replied. "We don't have as much experience as distant countries."
She did not specify what countries she considered to be "distant" but one could imagine that for a girl dreaming of North America, Ukraine was also a distant country.
The Prime Minister explained to Lyuda that neglect of women's hockey was partly due to the fact that it was not an Olympic sport.
"It is, it is," several girls, obviously hockey players, shouted in unison.
"They simply didn't make it to the last Olympics," the Minister of Sport, Vitaly Mutko explained.
"I see," Vladimir Putin nodded. "We do not consider it to be an Olympic sport because we didn't make it."
But he assured the girl that even if she did not make it to the Olympics she would visit North America.
A young man who turned out to be the captain of the junior men's hockey team, asked the Prime Minister what his favourite hockey team was.
"The Russian national team," Mr Putin replied. "They play well at present. Show a lot of character."
Obviously, he had watched a game against Belarus when the Russians were twice behind as the match progressed.
"Yes, the young man replied. We will be world champions again."
"What team would you like to play in?" the Prime Minister asked.
"In the Russian national team," the young man replied in kind.
"What club?" the Prime Minister persisted.
"I play in Rus club. I want to play in the NHL, the young man suddenly opened up and volunteered more information. For the Boston team."
That came as a surprise.
"In NHL, Vitaly Mutko murmured. How about playing in the KHL (Continental Eurasian Hockey League)?"
The young man didn't hear him. Alexander from Perm admitted that he was approaching the Army call-up age and asked whether it was possible to play professional sports while serving in the Army.
The Prime Minister took a long time answering that question. He said that "up until now the Armed Forces had not paid enough attention to sports, that "conditions for popular sports will be created", but "conditions should also be created for world-class sportsmen".
"We had a meeting recently and concluded that CSKA (Central Army Sports Club) should be preserved," the Prime Minister said. This was news because up until then the Defence Ministry's announcement that the whole CSKA system was to be reformed had not been denied.
"The CSKA will be preserved," the Prime Minister repeated, "but its composition will be reorganised. That applies both to athletes and coaches. It will have a new look and adequate funding... Those who serve in the Army will have a chance to practice sports in CSKA."
"They do not have a biathlon at CSKA," one of the athletes, apparently a biathlon athlete himself, chimed.
So, the new-look CSKA will have a chance, as before, to poach talented athletes for a couple of years. CSKA will inject new blood. Talented non-army athletes did not seem to like the idea.
"They do not practice the biathlon?" the Prime Minister asked again. "If there is no biathlon then the time has not come to talk about it."
That was an impeccable sentence, at least in the sense that one could not find any holes in it. There was no other sense in it.
"The most talented athletes will have a chance to practice their favourite sport if they show promise. We will settle that issue with the Defence Ministry in the same way as we settled it with regard to talented musicians, churchmen ... This is not a problem, because it applies not to millions of people, but only to a few individuals."
The message was clear: some would be exempt from Army service not on the grounds of ill health, but to the contrary, on the grounds of very good health.
Finally Vladimir Putin was asked whether it was more difficult to be the President or the Prime Minister.
"Everyone has his own job," he said. "One just has to do it well and then it is not difficult."
Up until now only the First President of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, used to give such "exhaustive" answers. But the Prime Minister, as it turned out, had not finished answering the question.
"Do you like the sport that you do?" Vladimir Putin asked the girl who had asked the question.
"Yes," she nodded.
"If you like what you do then even if you feel the stress both in training and in competition, emotional and physical stress... but if you do what you like you also feel satisfaction, especially if you achieve results... That makes a world of difference."
From this, one could conclude that Vladimir Putin liked his job as Prime Minister. That said, perhaps he liked the job of President even more.
