The unprecedented failure of Russia’s athletes at the 2010 Winter Olympics
gave rise to the standard questions - "Who is guilty?" and "What to do?"
One can assume that, given the harsh reaction of our leaders, this time sport officials will not be able to avoid concrete answers. The only pity is that there is every likelihood that these answers will involve the easiest solution to the problem - dismissing the negligent, and setting up yet another best and most comprehensive training program for the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi.
Alas, we can not expect more, at least judging from the reaction of Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko, Russian Olympic Committee President Leonid Tyagachev and KHL head Vyacheslav Fetisov, who are now on opposite sides of the barricades, but in fact talking about the same thing – if only the right people had been placed in the key posts, then all would have gone like clockwork.
However it is difficult to believe in this solution to all the problems. As far as I see, there is no reason to suspect that the Russian national team will miraculously transform itself in the fundamental and most important sports of the Olympic program during the next four years. But I'll try not to boil my opinion down to a purely supporter’s response and say simply that we've messed up again.
For almost 20 years, our sport continued to "eat up" the remnants of the great Soviet era. First of all, in terms of coaching techniques, the training system, and the motivation of athletes, for whom earning prize money was important, but not the only motivation to achieve success.
Russian football in this sense turned out to be a kind of precursor of total collapse, a phase of systemic disintegration in it came much faster than in skiing or skating. Then, through a huge black hole, money started pouring in from Gazprom and private investors. Some people thought that this was a miracle recipe, but Slovenia put everything in its place, returning our football fans to bitter reality. Now it is the turn of the rest - the biathlonists, the figure skaters and the skaters. For in the place of the methods of the second half of the last century came incomprehensible backroom coaching showdowns, pop-culture generals and general's wives, as is the case with Yevgeniy Plushenko, plus intense brainwashing on the subject that we are the best and the most worthy, but we are disliked and we are surrounded by enemies who systematically slip doping to our skiers and biathlonists, and who are absolutely clueless about the great figure skating of our dance couples and of Plushenko, the personal friend of 2008 Eurovision winner Dima Bilan.
If there had not been such a powerful propaganda attack, even the eighth places of our relay-race teams could have passed by our fans without leaving a mark –something along the lines of, “well, it is just one of those things. It's sport. The competitors have become stronger.”
But we have this arrogant and totally thoughtless campaign for the creation of artificial stars, of whom we supposedly should be proud, and these stars lose to the Canadians with a shameful score, and keep on believing in their own uniqueness and greatness. This campaign led to a completely unexpected result. Even those who still had some minimum illusions concerning our capabilities were finally stripped of them. There is no need for empty rhetoric about patriotism. If people's hearts ache for their sportsmen, they are much more patriotic than those who think primarily about their own great contracts and dancing with the stars. A great coach, Viktor Tikhonov Sr., said something very true once: "When you read the Russian media, it seems that there are only Russian stars in NHL. The Canadians have shown convincingly there is nothing of the kind".
Such a turn up for the books here, as Boris Yeltsin used to love to say. And now, in anticipation of the Sochi Olympics, it's frightening even to think what a flood of total PR there is going to be during the next four years. Unfortunately, this is more than a forecast – I am absolutely sure of this.
Alexei Vlasov exclusively for VC
