How the Kremlin Tried to Rig the Olympics, and Failed
When the Russian national hockey team lost to Canada, seven to three, in the hockey quarterfinals of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, forward Alexander Ovechkin knew it would be bad. “Now the dirt will pour down on us,” he said at the time. The dirt poured down from the very top. “Because of disgraceful performance of our team I’m afraid to approach TV-set,” tweeted Dmitry Rogozin, then Russia’s ambassador to NATO. “How on earth could we have blown it so disastrously in hockey?” Then-president Dmitry Medvedev canceled his trip to the closing ceremony, and the Siberian city of Tomsk held a moment of silence. I was living in Russia at the time, and I had never seen any country take the Olympics so seriously. Everyone I spoke to was shocked and utterly humiliated: It was the first time in Olympic history that Russia didn’t even get to compete for a medal in hockey.
But other Olympic humiliations abounded. Russia failed in that other sacred Russian winter sport, figure skating. The Russian skating pair that was favored to do well in the Olympics had to , called “Aboriginal Dance,” after it was decried as racist. Yevgeny Plushchenko took only silver and was so upset about it that Vladimir Putin (then the prime minister) had, “Your silver is worth gold.” It had to be, because Russia didn’t win that many golds in Vancouver. Even the Netherlands won more gold medals. Russian athletes only brought home total, finishing 11th in the medal count, despite being a country that was long seen as an Olympic juggernaut where winter takes up more than half the year.
