Category Archives: ukraine

Twisted

Leave a reply

Regarding the Western nations’ announcement of sanctions against Vladimir Putin’s close associates, should it be a surprise they include a woman, 32 years his junior, long identified as his mistress? Putin, currently directing the murder of thousands in neighboring Ukraine, isn’t exactly a man who heeds accepted moral or ethical norms.

Should it be a shock, furthermore, that the woman, Alina Kabaeva (sometimes spelled Kabayeva), was an Olympic champion whose athletic career was interrupted by a positive drug test—an uncommonly regular development in Putin’s Russia?

Beyond instigating real wars, Russia, which Putin has ruled as president or prime minister since 2000, has a well-earned reputation for subverting the conventions of international sports—the so-called wars-without-bullets. Through a systematic, state-supported doping program, more Russian competitors have been caught using banned stuff than athletes from any other nation.

The number of busted Russians is beyond 150, and the total of Russians stripped of Olympic medals is a world-leading 46, four times that of the next-highest country. Leading up to, and during, the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia—where Putin reportedly enjoys vacation time on the Black Sea and has built a second government office—Russia deployed what was identified as “the disappearing positive test methodology” to cover up hundreds of failed tests by its athletes.

The director of Sochi’s 2014 Olympic doping laboratory later blew the whistle on Russian officials and intelligence service members who surreptitiously replaced Russians’ drug-tainted urine samples with clean urine by passing bottles back-and-forth through a small hole in the lab’s wall.

Yes, foreign substances have turned up in athletes from many other countries, including the US of A. (Juicing without borders.) But it generally is accepted that the original state-sponsored doping operation was perfected in the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in the 1970s, when more than 10,000 unsuspecting East German jocks were given massive doses of banned anabolic steroids. (Check our Steven Ungerleider’s book, Faust’s Gold.)

It’s interesting to note that Vladimir Putin, working at the time for the Soviet Union’s notorious KGB, was stationed in the GDR at the time, in Dresden, and one function of the snooping KGB would have been to know about such skullduggery.

Might a similar government-coordinated process have been at work this winter when Russian figure-skater Kamila Valieva’s failed drug test before Beijing’s Winter Games belatedly became public, creating the latest Olympic scandal? Valieva, just 15, claimed to have been unaware of any illegal pharmaceuticals in her system and Putin publicly defended her, presented her with a state award, and declared that she was another case of Russian athletes victimized by discrimination based on nationality.

Meanwhile, about Kabaeva, Putin’s alleged paramour, who won a gold medal at the 2004 Athens Olympics in the quirky sport of rhythmic gymnasts, in which women perform 75- to 90-second routines cavorting with hoops, ropes, clubs, balls and ribbons. (We smart-aleck Olympic journos sarcastically called the discipline “whips and chains.”)

Rhythmic gymnasts essentially are contortionists—flipping, handspringing, cartwheeling while balancing the various pieces of apparatus—and Kabaeva was a star, a European and world champion by the time she was 16. But at 18, she was stripped of the 2001 world title after testing positive for the diuretic furosemide—outlawed because, as well as facilitating weight loss, it typically is used to mask other performance-enhancing substances. (Coincidental note: The woman who subsequently inherited that world title was Tamara Yerofeeva. A Ukrainian.)

Kabaeva nevertheless has continued to live a charmed and fabulously compensated life—presented by Putin with the top state honor, the Order of Friendship; appointed to a seat in Russia’s lower house of parliament; made chairwoman of the board overseeing state-controlled media; chosen to be among the final torchbearers for the 2014 Sochi Olympics. Just last month, appearing at a junior gymnastics festival in Moscow, she praised Putin for the war effort, which really is nothing but an invasion, in Ukraine.

Feels like another variation on the theme of Putin treachery. Another parable of tyranny. More whips and chains.

Once teammates

Leave a reply

Try finding the land of The Unified Team on an old map, circa 1992. Or the Commonwealth of Independent States. It’s a challenge that relates to the sudden discovery by many people of just where Ukraine is.

Here’s a big hint: Thirty years ago, the UT and the CIS represented an ad-hoc “nation” that had just evolved from what Ronald Reagan previously labeled “the evil empire” and that the soulless despot Vladimir Putin now wants to revive—the Soviet Union.

As the USSR fell apart in the early ‘90s, though, there came to be an apparently benign one-for-all and all-for-one arrangement, with all former Soviets staying temporarily on the same team. Just the opposite of how Putin is acting on his claim that “Russians and Ukrainians are one people” by having his Russian military murder Ukrainians.

This is a sports story, of sorts. But one which reminds how sports—like the arts and business worlds—are tangled up in government actions. Russia’s unprovoked invasion of its neighbor already has gotten athletes from Russia (and Belarus, because of that nation’s aid in the Russian attack) banned from the Paralympic Games, the upcoming World Games and events in international figure skating, ice hockey, swimming, skiing, badminton, canoeing, equestrian, gymnastics, rowing, rugby, shooting—even chess. Russia has been thrown out of soccer’s World Cup qualifying tournament while tennis has declared that Russian and Belarussian athletes only are welcome as “neutral” participants, minus their national affiliations.

But about the comparison from three decades ago. Following closely on the declaration of independence by the three Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia and Lithuanian—the USSR’s dissolution in late 1991 meant that the globe’s biggest sports stage, the Olympics, was scrambling to accommodate Russia and 12 former Soviet republics for the 1992 Albertville Winter Games.

The solution was to have athletes from those republics continue to participate on the Russian side (which didn’t stray far from an old and widespread assumption that all Soviets were Russian). Thus the one-time-only Olympic squad known as The Unified Team, representing the Commonwealth of Independent States. (Some of us wise-guy Westerners, having come from the other side in the Cold War, referred to them in shorthand as “The Commies.”)

The revealing aspect was how non-Russian Unified Teamers expressed a feeling of lost identity. All marched and received medals under the Olympic flag and with the Olympic anthem, and among the gold medalists who found the situation wanting was pairs skating champion Natalia Mishkutienok, a Belarussian who teamed with Ukrainian Artur Dmitriev.

The situation was “not good,” she said. “I like the Russian anthem and I like the Russian flag.” (Of course she meant the Soviet song and the red hammer-and-sickle USSR flag.) Viktor Petrenko, a Ukrainian who won the ’92 men’s skating title, said after his victory ceremony, “I want to see some flag. The Ukraine flag or Russian flag, that would be better.”

There were bad jokes about The Unidentified Team and how it had no fight song, no team pennant.

Petrenko wore warmups emblazoned with CCCP, the Cyrillic abbreviation for USSR. His official Olympic “identity record” listed his age as 22, his birth date as 6/17/69, his town of birth as “Odessa,” his country of birth as “Unified Team” and his nationality as “Unified Team.”

“We are still a team,” Petrenko said then. “We are still teammates. Everything’s the same like that. We just represent different republics. I really don’t know what’s going on in my country. But we’re still a team.”

All Unified Teamers had held aloft tiny flags representing their respective republics in the Opening Ceremonies and wore their individual country’s flag patches during the Games. Outside the Olympic skating hall, a sign soon appeared offering “for sale: Soviet training suits. All stock must go.” CCCP warmups were selling for $150 apiece.

Some Unifieds meanwhile found humor in the no-longer applicable words to the Soviet anthem…

Unbreakable Union of freeborn Republics

Great Russia has welded forever to stand.

Created in struggle by will of the people.

United and mighty, our Soviet land!

The “unbreakable union” was broken. And Putin’s attempts to put it back together by force after 30 years don’t appear to be going so well, in the one-team sense. A recent report noted that, among the Ukrainian citizens trapped in their native land by the Russian bombardment is Viktor Petrenko, the old skating champion from The Unified Team.

He was said to be in Kyiv, the capital. It’s on the map. And it was Mark Twain’s unsettling observation that “God created war so Americans would learn geography.”