Formerly, the slogan, Olympiad only for the Olympic athletes, was to be understood just the other way round, which was quite logical and justifiable. For what we call Olympiad is the whole four-year time span between the Olympic games as such. This means our young athletes should go in for sports en masse and improve their skills, so that the strongest of them later represent their country at the Olympics. This appears logical and attractive. And, moreover, it happened!
Let us now cast a cursory glance at the program of the just ended Olympic Games and try to find at least one sport that Ukrainian youth can practice on a mass scale for the next four years. In the recent past, most enthusiasts had easy access to skiing, skating, and ice hockey. Today, one can also do that provided he/she has enough money to pay for a trip to the Carpathians where one can ski in winter without any obstacles. You can also visit one of Ukraine’s three (!) artificial skating rinks to play hockey or another two rinks to do figure skating. The so-called public skating rinks, where boys and girls used to spend their leisure time from the 1930s to the seventies, have remained only as a portion of nostalgic reminiscences and urban folklore. Although other Olympic sports were not practiced on a mass scale even before, yet those who came to ski jump, ride luges and bobsleds, and aim a rifle on the biathlon lanes had previously played these mass winter sports. Let us not touch on our freestyle skiing “successes” achieved by teaching acrobats to land on skis. This is a hot potato to be discussed elsewhere.
This analysis of winter sports in Ukraine shows that such activities have virtually ceased to exist in the form they did before. There are a few groups of enthusiasts in some sporting events who work at their own risk, seek sponsors, and travel to competitions on their own — without much success. If our winter sports are to be looked at from this perspective, our athletes did well at the Olympics. Having only such facilities as a few almost dilapidated skating rinks, antiquated ski jumps, and dangerous skiing pistes, our athletes managed to outstrip in Salt Lake City their counterparts from countries where skating rinks and skiing lanes number in the thousands, ski jumps in the hundreds, and bobsled chutes in the dozens, and where they function all year round much to the joy of thousands young and old. Do our athletes, who contrive to work their way up to world competitions without all this not deserve a majestic monument? For our winter (and no only winter) sports have long been deprived of proper conditions, mass involvement, and centralized government funding.
All we have preserved is a large group of well-fed bureaucrats who regularly accompany athletes in foreign trips and murmur something about medals. They make God knows what reports and promises to their ministerial bosses. As we have just learned, we do not have either skiing or speed skating but do have the corresponding fully staffed federations. There is only one cross country male skier and two women skiers in Ukraine capable of taking part in international competitions, there are no speed skaters, no Alpine skiers, no ski jumpers. It is in fact easier to count what we have. It would be also easier to count medals if we had won some.
Can you imagine a photo featuring biathlete Zubrylova with a medal around the neck against the background of the whole mighty Olympic delegation of bureaucrats plus the For a United Ukraine political bloc plus a host of sponsors and others wishing to bask in the rays of Olympic glory? We simply have no athletes capable of taking top Winter Olympic awards. Two years ago, the situation was saved by girl swimmer Klochkova, whose two summer Olympic wins were used as a fig leaf to conceal the decline and fall of the nation’s Olympic movement. Now there is nobody to hide behind.
Aware that we are unable to climb the Olympic podiums, our sports officials have begun to downplay the issue, saying that the Ukrainian Olympic athletes did a good job and are not to be criticized. Why indeed?
A not small group of people, who have been resting for over a decade on what has remained of Soviet sports in Ukraine, will again lie low, the more so that nobody cares about them. Then they will again regroup and rename themselves, and successfully continue to destroy sports in this country.
I simply do not know what to do. On the one hand, I would like to take cheer from the bottom of my heart for the courageous loners who keep the sports world from forgetting that there is such a state as Ukraine. On the other hand, I am aware that every victory of a Ukrainian athlete prolongs the endless agony of an entity that really just consumes budget money.
As to the sports scandals, now the favorite subject of talks in the sports — and not only sports — world, we are insured against them. For scandals erupt only around champions.
