It has got a giant job to make preparations for its own Olympic Games in four years’ time, claims the BBC’s Richard Galpin. On a forbidding, snow-covered hill north of Moscow, lies a strange, concrete gadget. It provides a vital clue why Russia’s Olympic sportsmen returned home from Vancouver late on Monday night with their heads hung low, having delivered the states’s worst performance in winter Olympic Games . The gadget which twists and turns down the hill, stands alone in the middle of the boonies, a bizarre piece of modernity dropped into the country. It is Russia’s only pro track for the bobsleigh, luge and skeleton, and should have been a key coaching ground for some of the new generation of sportsmen that the country so seriously needed prior to the Vancouver Games. Though it was built too late. According to officers, the groups of sportsmen preparing for these crucial ice sports were only able to begin to train on the track about eighteen months back. “None of the sportsmen was ready,” asserted Oleg Sukhoruchenko, the chief coach at the track and a previous member of the Olympic bobsleigh team. “Vancouver was a horrible failure.” ‘Fat moggy’ bureaucrats Many questions are to be asked about the way the money supplied by the govt. for new facilities and coaching before the Vancouver Olympic Games was basically spent. Richard Galpin at Russia’s only sliding track Russia’s only sliding track was developed too late for Vancouver It is claimed that $25m ( £17m ) was allotted last year alone, and yet there’s agreement the country still lacks proper coaching facilities. In his angry statement on Monday calling on senior sports officers to resign, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned the sports federations, announcing they’d become like “fat cats”, and the focus should be shifted away from the bureaucrats and onto the sportsmen instead.
But among the outburst of hand-wringing and mud-slinging in Russia since the Vancouver Games drew to a close, there’s a general agreement that the difficulty is more deep-rooted, going back to the downfall of the USSR virtually twenty years back. “After the USSR fell down, there had been almost no investment in pro sport,” claims Oleg Sukhoruchenko, the bobsleigh coach. “So we have lost an entire generation of sportsmen. Therefore , our result in Vancouver. “But I’m certain lots of new Russian stars will appear awfully soon.” the issue is : How soon? Not prepared for Sochi Russia itself is hosting the following Winter Olympic Games in 4 years’ time. Russian ice hockey players react after their defeat to Canada. Photograph : twenty-four Feb 2010 Russia’s men’s ice hockey team lost in the quarter final to Canada 7-3 The games, expected to be held close to the Black Sea resort of Sochi, are a matter of status for Russia and particularly PM Vladimir Putin, who guaranteed Sochi’s bid for the Olympic Games was successful. Another gloomy performance by the Russian team in 2014 would be highly shaming for the country which, as an element of the USSR, ruled the Winter Games for years. But Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko, who is now under stress to resign, gave a gloomy prediction when he arrived back in Moscow on Monday night from Canada.
“It will take 6 to 8 years to develop the next generation of Olympic athletes,” he revealed. “It’s an extraordinarily heavy task, and we’ve only just started working on it.
“I do not think we’ll be prepared prior to the 2018 games.” President Medvedev and P. M. Putin will expect they can prove him wrong, so Russia isn’t humiliated once more.
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