Vladimir Putin gives instructions to sports officials for Sochi-2014.
At a meeting on Krasnopresnenskaya Embankment on Friday, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin urged sports officials no longer to lament the Russian team’s failure at the Olympic Games in Vancouver. Having reprimanded them, he fired no one but gave them instructions for a better showing at the Sochi Games in 2014.
Contrary to expectation, Putin’s tone was benevolent. Moreover, the Ministry of Sports, Tourism, and Youth Policy headed by Vitaly Mutko has received additional mandates and will soon be allowed to appoint coaches to the Olympic teams. When Mutko was asked whether he will continue working in his position with due account of past mistakes, he said with a sense of responsibility: “Of course.”
Putin’s analysis of the recent Olympics was so detailed that it could be supplemented only with emotional interludes. In fact, he started the meeting with the painful question: “How could we fall so low?” Then he recalled a proverb: “Victory has many fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” The heads of sports federations could find much to their liking in Putin’s speech, however, and he mentioned several causes of the defeat.
Putin spoke of the drain of the best coaches abroad, where the terms of work are more favourable, and the ten year financial breakdown in sports after the Soviet Union’s collapse that had caused the disintegration of the entire athletics infrastructure, despite which Russian teams secured medals for several Olympic seasons to come.
“The 11th place in the non-official point-count is not what millions of fans expected from our team in Vancouver. Now everyone is wondering: what happened?” Putin complained.
The government did all it could. It invested serious funding in sports, and the results seemed to be turning around, but the team was defeated in the main competition. According to figures quoted at the meeting, 3.5 billion roubles were spent on training the team for Vancouver. This fact prompted Putin to draw an interesting conclusion: “I even get the impression that the more we invest, the more modest the results are.” He added that the funds were most likely diverted from their intended purposes.
Putin emphasized that far from becoming competitive in new events, Russia has even failed to keep its traditional lead in figure skating, biathlon, skiing, skating, and hockey.
“We cannot explain everything with bad luck, although sports are sports. We must find what really stands behind this failure. The attempts to attribute defeats to unbalanced judging, the whims of the weather, or intrigues among rivals are inappropriate. They are the lot of outsiders,” Putin concluded.
He urged sports federations to become more transparent and called upon their heads to concentrate exclusively on this work. “The federations should be headed by people for whom this is their main occupation and calling in life,” Putin said.
He said that the relevant ministry should be granted the right not only to distribute funds, but also to coordinate programmes on training sportsmen and even appointing coaches. Mutko said that the government has already drafted a bill that will increase its influence on the performance of sports federations and toughen control on the expenditure of federal funds. He said that changes will be introduced into the system of accrediting federations and that his ministry will receive the right to appoint coaches. In addition, an expert system for appraising the federations’ training programmes will be developed and implemented.
In conclusion, Putin called upon sports officials to draw on the experience of their foreign colleagues who once borrowed so much from the Soviet system. “You should take the best elements of the Soviet training system and combine them with modern international experience,” he said. At the same time, he called on the regions to enhance their role in training sportsmen; currently only fifty have their own programmes for sports development. Putin thinks that Russia should build modern training facilities for all Olympic events.
Alongside these reforms, he emphasized the need to revise the salaries of coaches and experts working with the national team. “The financial support for sportsmen should be impeccable. Befitting funding must be organized for the entire period of training for competitions and depend upon the achieved results at every stage of work,” he said.
Putin believes that all these measures should result in long-awaited victories for the national team. Not everyone agreed, however, and he countered:
“After modest results at the Vancouver Olympics, I already hear some people say that as we prepare for Sochi, winning the Games is not as important as a good overall performance. I must tell you that this is wrong. Sportsmen take part in such competitions in order to win, not to sweat. Millions of fans in this country are expecting our team to win. In any event, we must be among the leading teams in Sochi in 2014,” he said.
Thus, the Russian government summed up the results of the Vancouver Olympics and determined what measures will bring success in Sochi. The routine formula for the financial and economic “crisis” has received one more adjective – “sports.”
By Pierre Sidibe