THEY BETTER LOBBY FOR ICE FISHING TO BECOME AN OLYMPIC SPORT...:

Medal Meltdown: Russia's leaders are furious at their country's Olympic performance. But they're blaming the wrong people, and so they're going to fail again in Sochi. (Owen Matthews and Anna Nemtsova, 3/03/10, Newsweek )

One crucial problem is that top coaches leave Russia all the time to train teams elsewhere. "We do not have enough time to bring up new stars after the Soviet sports establishment fell apart," says Shamil Tarpischev, a member of the International Olympic Committee and a former personal tennis coach to Boris Yeltsin. Open borders and the dissolution of the state athletic infrastructure—which, once upon a time, cultivated a victory-or-gulag ethos among Russian athletes—bred a generation of mercenary trainers. "There are no healthy ideas of how to build a new [establishment in its place]. All our best winter sports coaches have left to train foreign teams…Both the pay and the level of respect are incomparably higher [abroad]. The ones who stayed in Russia work for TV shows teaching movie stars to dance on ice." [...]

But instead of spending money to keep native talent home, the $47 million spent by the state in the last two years on preparations and training for the 2010 games was badly misallocated, says Sergei Markov, a member of Russia's Parliament. "Instead of investing in ice-skating rinks and ski slopes, the money was set aside for huge prize bonuses for athletes if they won medals—far more prize money than American athletes get. Yet at the same time, coaches have miserable pay, so these people escape abroad in search for better treatment. The Vancouver failure was the beginning of the end of the glory of Russian sport."

...because they are a nation of old drunks sans young people.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 4, 2010 6:55 AM