Olympics-Russia in 'Cold War' fury over bias
By Tara FitzGerald
MOSCOW, Feb 22 (Reuters) - Sports-mad Russians, led by their president,
rose fiercely to the defence of their Winter Olympic team on Friday
after the athletes threatened to pull out of the games in a Cold
War-style face-off.
The traditionally strong Russian team, feeling cheated of gold medals,
has accused judges and officials in Salt Lake City of victimising its
athletes, recalling the "us-and-them" style rivalry of the Soviet Union
and the United States.
In a nation that has avidly followed every twist and turn of the Games
in the past two weeks, Russians across the board -- from teachers to
taxi drivers -- were of one mind.
"It makes me so angry I can't even talk about it," said Igor, a gym
manager in a typical comment on the street. "If they can't win fairly,
they'll win any way they can."
State news agency RIA, in a sharp comment filled with anti-U.S. rhetoric
reminiscent of Soviet-era dispatches, said Russia had "literally
exploded with indignation." It accused the United States of
appropriating the Olympic Games.
President Vladimir Putin, normally careful to avoid diplomatic scenes
and with a Moscow summit with U.S. President George W. Bush on the
horizon, was unusually quick to jump into the fray and take a firmly
populist line.
The Kremlin leader, himself a sports enthusiast, said the Russian team
had been "subjected...to unfair and biased judging."
A black-belt judo expert and keen skier and swimmer, Putin lashed out at
the new International Olympic Committee (IOC) leadership under Jacques
Rogge, saying "excessive commercialisation" had played a role in the
affair.
He also accused Russian Olympic officials of being too passive in
defence of their athletes.
"Juan Antonio Samaranch has gone and Jacques Rogge has taken his place.
Regrettably for the new leadership, the first time is bound to be a
flop," he told reporters at the Kremlin.
Putin added that he hoped the IOC leadership "will manage to solve these
difficulties. I hope they are of a temporary character."
Even the head of Russia's Orthodox Church, Patriarch Alexiy II, rushed
to join the chorus of complaints.
OLYMPICS IN THE DUMA
The State Duma (lower house of parliament) hotly debated the perceived
injustices and voted overwhelmingly in favour of boycotting the closing
ceremony if no explanations or apologies were forthcoming from the IOC.
The controversy was enough to make Russian nationalist bad boy and
leading parliamentarian Vladimir Zhirinovsky put aside his new
pro-American stance and revert to Uncle Sam-bashing.
"The team must be recalled immediately, this evening," said Zhirinovsky.
"We should spit in their faces -- the referees and those hosting the
Games. This is merely a settling of accounts by criminal sports
structures," he thundered in a table-thumping speech to parliament.
But Russian IOC member Shamil Tarpishchev said it would be a "mistake"
to pull the Russian team out before the end.
"We should not take any hot-headed decisions," Tarpishchev told Reuters
by telephone. "We must look at the situation calmly, and then take a
decision."
The Olympic dream started to turn sour early last week when a row
erupted over the judging of the pairs figure skating.
The Russians won gold, but after a public outcry and a protest by
Canada, the second-placed Canadian pair were awarded duplicate golds.
Russian patience snapped when a ruling on Thursday forced their
hot-favourite women's 4x5 km cross-country relay team to pull out of the
competition following "abnormalities" in some of their blood samples.
Russia has won just five gold medals in the games so far.
The heat will be turned up even further later on Friday when Russia and
the United States square up to each other in an ice hockey semifinal.
Always set to be a tough match, the "Cold War" face-off is likely to
give the clash an added edge. Russia's biggest television channel, ORT,
has taken the unusual step of broadcasting the game, starting at 2 a.m.
Moscow time, live nationwide.
******
#2
THE UNIPOLAR OLYMPIAD
MOSCOW, 22 February. /RIA NOvosti correspondent Anatoly Korolyov/. The
last drop of humiliation - elimination of the Russian women team, the
major gold medal contenders, before the start of the skiing relay race
exhausted Russia's patience and it literally burst with indignation.
Members of the government, parliamentarians, journalists and sportsmen -
all raised angry protests in relation to the situation in Salt Lake
City.
The statement of President Vladimir Putin crowned "the tenth wave" of
anger and disillusionment. The head of the Russian state "fully and
wholly" shares indignation in the country in regards to biased decisions
of the International Olympic Committee and referees.
The world of sport knows a lot of examples of referees' mistakes but the
present Olympiad is characterised both by the unprecedented number of
referees's negligence cases and the scale of their consequences for
sportsmen. Such things never happened at the last winter games in
Nagano, nor at the summer games in Sydney.
But even at that time observers were drawing attention to the excessive
commercialization of the games as a threat to referees' objectiveness.
But at the moment we are faced with the gravest Olympic movement crisis
since 1980. And this crisis is also a political one as it was 20 years
ago when in the midst of the Russian-American opposition sport turned
out to become a hostage of political engagement.
Already the first Olympic scandal in Salt Lake City when the gold medal
of Russian figure skaters became "halved" by Canadians demonstrated that
Russians were still considered as adversaries but not on sport grounds
but on the fields of the "cold war". The Canadian pair followers failed
to find arguments other than to declare the victory of the Russian
sportsmen to be the result of a plot of "the Soviet bloc referees".
The anti-Russian unprecedented campaign initiated in mass media of the
USA and Canada, as it became clear now, marked the beginning of
unprecedented referees' prejudice.
Not only in Russia people speak about the complete violation of the
Olympic spirit. Mass media of many countries are also seized with the
same indignation. According to the Japanese agency Kyodo Tsusin, the
Olympiad acquired a totally pro-American character. The Agency described
that as "cultural imperialism".
Sport became just another hostage of the unipolar world where an
American perceives himself, automatically and legally, as the owner of
the Olympic games, is considering them as his purely internal matter.
Chairman of the International Olympic Committee Jacques Rogge in his
letter to President Vladimir Putin ( an unprecedented step in the
history of the Olympic games) continues to stubbornly report that the
"referees' rulings were absolutely fair". Thus the pro-American
International Olympic Committee does not intend to take notice of the
anti-Russian spirit of referees' rulings in relation to obvious
victories of Russian Olympians in women's freestyle, in single figure
skating or bad refereeing in the hockey game with the Czechs.
Similarly not only sportsmen from Russia are pressured, though on a much
smaller scale. But in contrast with the inert reaction of Russian
officials, the South Korean team already brought an action against the
biased referees' ruling in relation to Kim Dong-Sung who was the first
to cross the finish line and "interfered" with the American sportsman.
Another problem of contemporary sport became turned upside down in Salt
Lake City: the doping problem. The present "doping terror" in accordance
with the proper political rules is presented as "concern for sportsmen's
health". But such concern had already led to another double standards
absurdity. Famous biathlonist Viktor Mamatov, head of the Russian
delegation, stated that 90 percent of sportsmen who won in Salt Lake
City were listed among asthmatics! And consequently, had the official
authorization to use before the start special medications which
significantly increase the muscle mass. This is legitimatized doping.
Nevertheless protests of the Russian side were left unattended by the
International Olympic committee.
Many finals of the Olympiad are still coming but its main conclusion is
already evident: sport of high achievements is on the verge of the "cold
war" and the Olympic movement is on the eve of collapse.
Serbian News Network - SNN
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http://www.antic.org/
