184 Belarusian Yearbook 2017
Sports: The worst Olympic year ever
Borys Tasman
Summary The performance of the Belarusian national team at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro was the litmus test to determine the efficiency of the entire sports industry in Belarus: negative trends that had accumulated for years turned into the worst performance of the national team in the history of the sovereign country. Doping problems reduced the size of the Belarusian Olympic delegation to a record low and weakened it. In addition, seven awards of the 2008 and the 2012 Olympics were annulled. Sloppy work with the reserve led to the fact that the national Olympic team was a record ‘old’ one. Criminalization hidden in the depths of the industry manifested in litigations on a national scale.
Trends: • Reduction in competencies of sports senior and middle managers and as a result, multiple management failures; • ‘Aging’ of the national team, very feeble work with the reserve; • Degradation of all kinds of sports that used to be leading; • Corruption at all levels.
Olympic retreat At the main sports event held every four years – the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro – the Belarusian team won 9 medals: 1 gold, 4 silver and 4 bronze. In the medal count Belarus took the 40th position (Table 1). It was the lowest result of the Belarusian Olympic team at the summer Games. The number of medals is the worst in the history of sovereign Belarus (see Table 2). Almost three months later, the President of Belarus and of the National Olympic Committee, Alexander Lukashenko, gave quite a harsh assessment of the performance of the Belarusian team: “We all saw how our athletes performed during the Olym- pic Games in Rio. I see that our sport functionaries keep talking happily about it. They are satisfied… Well, they may be satisfied but you and I are not and neither is the nation?”1
1 “Belarus president urges to improve personnel situation in social services.” BelTA. 11 Oct. 2016. Web. 28 Feb. 2017. Table 1. Medal count of the 31st Olympic Games Gold Silver Bronze Place* Country Total medal medal medal 1 (1) USA 46 37 38 121 2 (4) UK 27 23 17 67 3 (2) China 26 18 26 70 4 (3) Russia 19 18 19 56 5 (5) Germany 17 10 15 42 … 21 (47) Uzbekistan 4 2 7 13 22 (18) Kazakhstan 3 5 9 17 … 31 (12) Ukraine 2 5 4 11 … 38 (32) Georgia 2 1 4 7 39 (25) Azerbaijan 1 7 10 18 40 (22) Belarus 1 4 4 9 * Medal count is ranked by the priority of gold medals. In brackets the places of the Olympic teams at the 2012 Olympics are indicated. Table 2. Medals of Belarus at the Summer Olympics Year Gold medal Silver medal Bronze medal Total 1996 1 6 8 15 2000 3 3 11 17 2004 2 5 6 13 2008 3 4 7 14 2012 2 5 3 10 2016 1 4 4 9 From the point of view of the Belarusian leadership, to lose to the representatives of the United States, China and Europe is not so shameful as to be behind some of the countries of the former USSR. Previously only the Russians and the Ukrainians were ahead of the Belarusians. In London in 2012, Kazakhstan joined them. Now the picture is quite different: the Belarusian national team was bypassed by Uzbekistan, Georgia and Azer- baijan. In this conventional competition Belarus took the distant seventh place. It is known that its 18 awards Azerbaijan won largely due to the active naturalization of athletes from other countries. How- view/belarus-president-urges-to-improve-personnel-situation-in-social- services-95280-2016/>. 186 Belarusian Yearbook 2017 ever, one cannot ignore a serious progress of Uzbeks (13 med- als) and Kazakhs (17 medals), who don’t try to be masters of all Olympic trades but focus on martial arts: boxing, freestyle wrestling and Greco-Roman wrestling, judo. The results are amazing. In the ring, for example, boxers from Uzbekistan surpassed Cubans and became world leaders. Factors of decline In Brazil, the Belarusian Olympic team was the smallest in the entire sovereign history of the country: 124 athletes. Even if to add seven kayakers and canoeists, who were arbitrarily removed from the Olympics by the decision of the ICF, there would remain 131 people whereas in London in 2012 there were 168 athletes and in Beijing in 2008 – 181 representative of Belarus. Before Rio, Belarus had the smallest teams in 1996 (144 people) and in 2000 (134 people). Thus, during eight years the country lost fifty Olympians, which cannot be accidental. Let us high- light the main reasons for this decline. 1. Stricter doping controls. As a result, the following athletes were disqualified or removed: the hammer throwers Oksana Menkova and Pavel Kryvicki, runners Natalia Kore- ivo and Anis Ananenko, long jumper Nastassia Mironchyk- Ivanova, shot-putters Nadzeya Ostapchuk, Pavel Lyzhyn, Andrei Mikhnevich and Natalia Mikhnevich, walker Anna Drabenia, weight-lifter Maryna Shkermankova, etc. All of them are participants of Olympic Games and world cham- pionships, top-ranking athletes. In total around two dozen Olympians were out. But the doping control stopped also less famous athletes who failed to adjust to new methods of preparation. Since 2004, the IOC has stored doping samples of medalists of the Olympics for eight years so that at the end of this period to recheck them with new anti-doping technologies. More than a thousand samples of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2012 London Olympics were re-analyzed on sixteen kinds of sports taken from the representatives of 89 countries. More than a hundred tests proved to be positive for doping. According to the results of rechecking Belarus lost 5 medals of the 2008 Beijing Society 187 Olympics (1 gold, 2 silver, 2 bronze), and 2 bronze medals of the 2012 London Olympics2. 2. Weak reserves. A classic example is gymnastics: Belaru- sians made it to the Olympic podiums from 1960 to 1996. In Rio, Belarus was represented by American Kylie Dixon and former Russian Andrei Likhovitsky. A similar pattern is observed in fencing: Belarusian ‘Musketeers’ dominated the Games from 1960 to 1988. In Brazil only Alexander Bujkevich fenced. Free-style wrestling is completely dominated by wrestlers from the North Caucasus now: in Rio there were Asadulla Lachinov, Omargadzhi Magomedov and Ibragim Saidov who, by the way, won the bronze medal. In many types of sports due to the lack of decent reservists and true competition the gaps were filled by veterans. In the end, in Rio the Olympic team of Belarus was the oldest, where 41 athletes out of 124 (one third of the whole) were 30 years old and even older, 13 people were over 35 years old. New names were also pronounced: the only Olympic champion trampolin- ist Ulad Hancharou (20 years), silver medalist wrestler Maryia Mamashuk (23) and the lifter Darya Naumova (21). But these names are very few. The negative trend, according to which there is a decrease in the number of Olympians and Olympic prizes (124 participants and 9 awards is an anti-record in the history of independent Belarus) will persist unless the reserve training is improved. 3. Management failures became evident in personnel policy, in the use of financial flows and organization of pre-Olympic training. In particular, nine months prior to the Games the management of athletics formed an “A” group (20 athletes) which received priority funding, and a “B” group (31 people), consisting mainly of athletes of promise in sports. 13 people were selected for Rio from the “A” group and only 11 athletes from the “B” group. A dozen athletes, who had complied with the Olympic standards, were not included either in A or B groups. The only gold medal was won by 40-year-old Ivan Tsikhan, who 2 «Пробы – плюс, медали – минус. Беларусь лишают наград ОИ за допинг» Naviny.by. 27 Oct. 2016. Web. 28 Feb. 2017. Metastases of criminality In 2016, the center of the criminalization of the Belarusian sports moved to football. The director of the Department of Refereeing and Inspection of the Belarusian Football Federa- tion (BFF), 52-year old Andrey Zhukov was accused of taking bribes six times over the appointment of referees to officiate the matches of the national championship. The total amount 3 For details seе: «Le Monde: В 17 пробах белорусских гребцов обнаружен мельдоний. Минспорта опровергает.» TUT.by. 26 May 2016. Web. 28 Feb. 2017. Conclusion The negative trends in the sports sector have accumulated over many years, but earlier it was possible to hide them due to professionals, raised by the Soviet sports school, and due to importing foreign players from Russia and Ukraine. Currently those who were born in the USSR are 40-year old athletes, and the ‘neighbors’ began to treat their human resources more assiduously. And yet, out of nine Olympic medals two belong to wrestlers, who arrived in Belarus from the North Caucasus. The reserve group in most kinds of sports is aimed at get- ting immediate results instead of achieving results in the elite sports. The local successes of juniors are presented as national triumphs; they are honored at the highest level. Typically such athletes get lost on the way to the top-class sports. Funding of the national teams is redundant, and their num- ber is excessive – more than forty-five. As a result the received budgetary funds, including foreign currency, get scattered over all the different teams. Criminalization of team sports indirectly affects the perfor- mance of the national teams. The national Belarusian soccer team failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup and its coach Aleksander Khatskevich was dismissed. The hockey team barely kept its place in the elite division of the world championship and lost the pre-Olympic qualifying tournament in Minsk to the team of Slovenia. Any change in the situation described would require rede- fining the concept of how to develop the sports sector, shifting investment and personnel flows to the reserve, upgrading the material base and ensuring effective doping-control, not only for athletes but also for the staff.