Three months before London

Considering the sad experience of the Olympic Games in Beijing, Russian sporting officials are treating the London Olympics more seriously. “Immediately after Beijing a comprehensive training program for the team was developed, the target complex programs. Now in the final stage, we have almost for each team, each athlete, a specific program of training and preparation of athletes for the Olympic Games,” Vitaly Mutko, Minister of Sports, Tourism and Youth Policy of Russia, says. “Over the past few years we have managed with the Olympic Committee and our colleagues from federations to normalize the situation. Today we have established good cooperation with all the federations, signed agreements on cooperation. In recent years several important issues related to logistics of teams were resolved; wages were increased; the government developed the payment system. You know that we have adopted the necessary decisions regarding the prize fund. It is 4 million for the gold medal, for the silver medal - 2.5 and 1.7 million for the bronze medal. In recent years, we were able to slightly improve the logistics and scientific support of the teams of the country.

If we take the Olympic sports, in 2008 only 10 summer Olympic sports had their own training centers. There are now about 27 bases available for the teams. Certainly, we need to rent the rest. The objective for the beginning of 2015 is to eliminate the problem and to provide all the 58 Olympic sports with their own training bases, so that we could train there.” Mutko thinks that sporting officials “have generally worked rather well on changing today's image of Russia as a country which meets all the requirements of the Anti-Doping laws and the WADA Code. We have put the Anti-Doping Agency "RUSADA" on its feet. In general, today we are modernizing our anti-doping laboratories.”

In London there will be 302 sets of medals in 37 sports. The Russian team will include about 440 to 460 athletes who will go to the Olympics. “We believe that the team is competitive enough: out of the 37 sports, in at least 25 our athletes are showing great performance. Traditional sports you know. We continue to very seriously rely on and to hope for, since we have all the good reasons to do so, such sports as wrestling and boxing. We have synchronized swimming and rhythmic gymnastics, kayaking and canoeing, and to some extent, gymnastics and weightlifting. Competition is great – the top ten countries include China, the USA, Russia, Australia, UK, Japan, France, Germany and Spain. Going to war without big plans is impossible.”
According to Mutko, 200 million rubles will be spent by Russia on participation in the Olympics. “It includes flight tickets, hotel residence, travel expenses and so on. I think we have found an optimal balance between moral and material benefits. Money doesn’t mean everything in sport. Only two years ago we managed to stabilize the situation with salaries. We normalized the situation on January 1st, 2011. The average salary of an athlete of the national team was 12 thousand rubles. 240 days in a year are spent at training bases without family. It is his or her job. A person wastes his health, he is the best in this sphere.

In 2011 we found a balance between the salary system, we increased salaries – the minimum salary in the national team is 35 thousand rubles and the maximum salary is 120 thousand rubles. Only world champions and honored athletes receive the maximum salary. A young athlete gets 35 thousand rubles.”
Alexander Zhukov, President of the Russian Olympic Committee, said: “In the past we used to live within a planned economy, we used to develop plans. The market economy relies on predictions. The same thing applies to sport. We shouldn’t develop a plan, a directive. However, there is a point in prediction. We need it for understanding our abilities. But it doesn’t mean a directive plan. As for material motivation of athletes, an Olympic champion is the best professional at his job. If the Olympic Games included competitions among journalists and steelmakers, the best professional would be selected. To be the best professional in your job you should devote your whole life to it. Moreover, an athlete’s term is not long. Only rare individuals manage to stay at the top after 35. A person devotes his whole life to it. So if you think that 100 thousand euros is too huge prize for it… I don’t think so. I think the sum spent by the government for encouragement of an Olympic champion who devotes his life to achieving this top level, moreover, he or she represents our country and brings prestige to our country, and for the majority of athletes this is as important as their personal victory. So I think material encouragement is a normal thing.”

“Speaking firmly about medals we need to change the system and create a new system of reproduction of the national team members. We need a complete modernization of the system of sporting reserve training. Today there are 8,480 children and youth sporting schools in Russia. And we have clear problems in this system. 60% of them belong to the education system. They are education facilities of supplementary education. 30% of them have no material base. A coach earns 6-8 thousand rubles at initial stages of training. Methodology, the competition system and selection are absent. In some kinds of sport the substitutes’ bench is absent. For example, rowing and canoeing is a global kind of sport without which we cannot dominate in sport. Cycling – 18 gold medals. Today they like to present our young men getting caught cheating. But let’s look at all the world championships, we haven’t lost anything because of that. We have a group of athletes who are able to fight for medals at track. We began to return to gymnastics, the male team is very young.

Of course this concerns Sochi, as in winter kinds of sport the situation is more difficult. The main direction of the strike is supplying our athletes with all the necessary things and we will continue to do so, but without a substitutes’ bench… That is why in many teams we have decided to form 2 to 4 teams. The first and the second teams are at the center of the national team. This year we have established a special budgetary facility – the Center of Sporting Reserve Training. We want to establish a certain system. We have defined the main kinds of sport in every region where some special sporting school exists, a growing point. For example, Voronezh has a gymnastics school, so we should come and establish a real center there. We have allocated 1 billion rubles for this work. For the first time in history a subsidy is allocated for development of regional training centers. Federal bases.

In 2008, 14 to 15 kinds of sport had training bases. It’s a shame that boxing, weight-lifting and wrestling have no bases. We opened a center for the national judo team in April in Zvenigorod. The national boxing team had to re-equip a sporting hall for enabling sportsmen to train for the Olympic Games in London. At the moment the prime minister has made a series of decisions. We bought a center in Kislovodsk and modernized it for athletics and wrestling. Of course, we are tailing off. You cannot teach a person to play the violin without a violin. There are some technical kinds of sport that demand certain conditions. We are working on it. We hope that the system will be established in a couple of years.”