Russia seeks answers for Olympic flop

Russia, long accustomed to boosting national pride with sporting success, has been left scrambling for explanations for its dismal Olympics showing just four years before it hosts the Winter Games.

The Russian squad recorded its worst ever performance in Vancouver, finishing 11th in the Games' medal table and clinching only three gold medals and 15 overall.

For a country used since Soviet times to one champion after another stepping onto the top of the medal rostrum to the rousing strains of the national anthem, the failure has been nothing short of a trauma.

The team's performance showed up the failure of Russia to replace the all-conquering Soviet sports system with a modern equivalent and the cost of so many top coaches emigrating abroad over the last two decades.

"We need to start from the very beginning," said one of Russia's most celebrated post-Soviet Olympians, swimming legend Alexander Popov, who won four Olympic gold medals.

"The Soviet system of ruling the sports was destroyed after the fall of the Soviet Union. Now we need to create the new one." "Once, we suffered from lack of funding but now we have even more money than we need. Now is the time to learn how to use funding effectively, develop sports infrastructure, to manage sports proper way."

"We need to pay much more attention to the children's sport, to bring up children to love their country and to be proud of it.

"We all have lost too much of our national pride in the post-Soviet years," he added.

Russian Olympic Committee deputy president Vladimir Vasin lamented how the fall of the Soviet system and the severe financial crisis that followed forced many of country's sports specialists to seek their fortunes abroad.

"I heard Russian spoken from people dressed in many other countries' uniforms in the Olympic village," said Vasin, himself a former Olympic champion.

"Our top specialists were spread around the world. Russia was the biggest donor to the world sports in recent years."

With funds now flowing back into Russian sport, the country has a race against the clock to sort out the problems of its sports management before the 2014 Winter Olympics in its southern city of Sochi.

The Vancouver games were marked by a series of unwelcome firsts for Russia, not least the flop of the figure skaters, who finished without an Olympic gold medal for the first time in 50 years.

Triple Olympic champion Irina Rodnina launched a scathing attack on the head of the Russian figure skating federation, Valentin Piseyev, blaming him for his team's dismal performance.

"Serious people in the figure skating world do not want to deal with him. They have no respect for him," said Rodnina, who won all of the competitions where she performed during her career.

One of the few success stories for Russia was the performance of the biathlon team, who won two of three Russia's gold medals at the Games under a far more modern system of management.

They were helped by funds from the Russian Biathlon Union president Mikhail Prokhorov, one of the Russia's richest men, and the sage administration of the federation executive chief Sergei Kushchenko who came from CSKA Moscow basketball side.

In recent years Kushchenko, one of the best country's sports managers made a priceless countribution into CSKA success, leading the Red Amry side to numerous domestic titles and two titles of the basketball Euroleague.

Russia's top political establishment have also called for heads to roll after the Games debacle.

Sergei Mironov, the speaker of the upper house of Russia's parliament, said he was expecting the resignation of Leonid Tyagachev, the head of Russia's Olympic Committee (ROC) and Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko.

"I expect they both will write their letters of resignation on March 1," Mironov said. "I consider it to be a completely right and logical move."

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin also expressed disappointment, hinting at personnel changes to get better results in 2014.

"Of course, we expected more," Putin said. "But all the same it's not a reason to lose heart, scatter our heads with ashes and beat ourselves to exhaustion with chains."