#3
Moscow Times
February 28, 2002
No Prize at All for Progress
By Pavel Felgenhauer

During the Cold War, major international sporting events such as the Olympic Games were a substitute for armed conflict, but without the bloodshed and carnage. After defeats, the sportsmen could walk away to fight another day or could simply leave the sports arena to live normal lives.

In the Soviet Union, the Olympic gold medal-producing industry was given the same state priority as strategic nuclear missile production and some times even higher priority. Major Soviet research institutes, primarily in the fields of chemistry and biology, received generous government grants to help give athletes an unfair advantage and bring home the cherished Olympic golds.

Sports that were not represented at the Olympics (baseball, cricket, etc., including some traditional Russian sports) for the most part got little government funding. But if a sport made it into the Olympic arena,the authorities began to forcibly cultivate it, even if no one knew the rules and the public had no interest in the particular sport.

In the 1970s and 1980s, following Moscow's lead, East Germany began to mass-produce Olympic champions (primarily women) by relentlessly pumping athletes with steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs. The GDR's sporting tricks were exposed after German unification, but in Russia, there has been no cleanup of the corrupt Olympic medal-producing industry.

Former Soviet officials control sports today, the same doctors and coaches are, apparently, still pumping athletes with performance-enhancing drugs and so on. Sports seems to be just as corrupt as in Soviet times, maybe even more so, as many former Soviet athletes and Olympic champions, sports officials and coaches have in the past decade been involved in organized crime and in some instances organized major criminal mobs of their own, while maintaining connections with the sports world.

Like many other former Soviet state institutions, sports organizations were partially privatized. The result has been fewer medals at the Olympics, but more illicit profit for corrupt officials. Stadiums were converted into markets. In the first half of the 1990s, the National Sports Fund was created and allowed to import large amounts of duty-free alcohol and tobacco and so on. Hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from these activities apparently disappeared without trace.

It is hardly surprising that at the Olympics in Salt Lake City, Russian sports officials behaved in a Cold War manner. But it was in fact not their own initiative to do so. They hate public scandals that interfere with business and began issuing ultimatums only under direct orders from the Kremlin.

At a press conference last Thursday in Salt Lake City, sports officials acknowledged that President Vladimir Putin personally phoned the Russian Olympic chief, Leonid Tyagachyov, and demanded action after a women's ski team was disqualified. Tyagachyov told reporters that Russia might boycott the last two days of the Olympic if its demands were not met and confessed that a final decision to stay or leave would be made in the Kremlin.

Tyagachyov was so agitated that he slipped back in time more than a decade and told reporters that the decision would be taken in consultation with the International Directorate [of the Central Committee of the Communist Party]. Nowadays this directorate has been replaced by the presidential administration.

Also, apparently quoting Putin, sports officials said that the mistreatment of Russian athletes was the result of a conspiracy by reactionary forces that were planning to sabotage the summit in Moscow with U.S. President George W. Bush in May.

Several hours after the press conference, Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov issued an unprecedented note of protest to the IOC. The Duma passed an almost unanimous resolution calling for a boycott of the closing of the Olympics. But later Putin, apparently, recovered from his fit of uncontrolled rage, the situation began to slowly normalize and there was no boycott.

But it is remarkable how fully and unquestioningly the public, press and ruling elite followed Putin in his fit of xenophobia and how slowly things are returning to normal.

Russia's unreformed sports organizations, as well as many other unreformed national institutions, make integration of this country into the community of democratic nations a still remote possibility.

Pavel Felgenhauer is an independent defense analyst.

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