Russia’s Winter Games performance irks PM Putin
MOSCOW, Russia (AFP) — Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin yesterday expressed disappointment at his country’s mediocre performance at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, vowing personnel changes to get better results in 2014.
“Of course, we expected more,” Putin said in televised remarks during the opening of a judo centre in the Siberian city of Tyumen.
“But all the same it’s not a reason to lose heart, scatter our heads with ashes and beat ourselves to exhaustion with chains.”
In a hint that heads would roll in official Russian sports bodies, Putin called for “serious critical analysis and conclusions, perhaps including organisational conclusions”.
Such measures would be aimed at getting a “worthy performance” from Russian athletes in the next Winter Games in the southern Russian city of Sochi in 2014.
Russian officials and media outlets have reacted bitterly to the country’s haul of only three gold medals in Vancouver, especially after the painful defeat of Russia’s vaunted ice hockey team by Canada on Wednesday.
“This is beneath any criticism,” president Dmitry Medvedev’s top foreign policy aide Sergei Prikhodko told reporters yesterday, referring to Russia’s Olympic performance.
“To a large degree, that’s a mark given to all our sports,” Prikhodko said, stressing that he was not speaking in his official capacity but rather as a sports fan.
“I have not watched any (Olympic) broadcast to the end,” he said.
Russia is usually near the top of Olympic medals tables, but its performance has weakened since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its generous state financing of sports.
Prikhodko declined to confirm Russian media reports that Medvedev had cancelled plans to go to Vancouver for the Olympics closing ceremony because of the country’s poor performance.
The Kremlin never officially announced Medvedev’s plans to go to Canada, Prikhodko said. “Maybe there were plans; we have tons of plans,” he said.