Kathy Sheridan: Russia’s beef with the Rio rations

The head of the Russian delegation in Rio is not happy with the rations in the Olympic village. There is no variety in the meals or the fruit “always the same ones over and over” . There are “big problems with tea in Brazil. Everyone tries to push coffee on you”. And then there’s the cutlery; they were given metal forks and spoons at first but then they just got disposable ones.

It made Igor Kazikov wistful for the 2014 Sochi winter games back in old Russia: "Sochi was superior to all other Olympic Games", he told a Russian-language outlet, as translated by Slate.com.

Mmmh, Sochi . . . Sochi . . . Rings a bell. Oh yes. Maybe because it’s only a month – a month! – has passed since the World Anti-Doping Agency revealed that it was at the Sochi games that a Russian state security agent unsealed athletes’ urine sample bottles and replace the contents with clean urine. All Russian Olympians are considered tainted now, even by the 96 cosseted luminaries of the cowardly International Olympic Committee.

Yet, Mr Kazikov seems entirely untroubled by shame or humility, still less a hint of sympathy for his host, a country undergoing its worst economic crisis since the 1930s, unable to pay public sector workers and best known for a nightmarish virus.

Shady characters

Russia is far from the sole offender, of course, or the most sophisticated. On Team GB, while Mo Farah deems himself to be in the pantheon with Haile, Kenenisa and Zatopek, his track exploits will never out-run his continuing association with shady characters suspected to dabble in performance-enhancing drugs. Yet there is always that niggle: what if he is actually is “one of the best guys in the world”, as he describes himself? With an eye on Almaz Ayana, the Ethiopian who smashed the 10,000m record hardly breaking a sweat,

Mary Hannigan

neatly distilled our dilemma. Do we, she asks, a) watch Ayana’s extraordinary run and declare ourselves lucky to be alive to witness it? Or b), say, “are you having a laugh?”.

We’re a long way from Kansas, Toto. Or Chariots of Fire. Nonetheless, it’s that time every four years when the couch spuds of the world are programmed to gape in wonder at the exploits on screen, to be moved to tears by the interviewers’ desperate, repetitive emoting and above all, be inspired to go for a run, or a swim or to punch something.

This is why the Irish boxing team, for example, has received €3.49 million in direct high-performance funding since London, and now gets more than any of our Olympic sports. It sounds generous enough – until compared to, say, Team GB, for which each Rio medal has cost £5.5 million on average. As in Ireland, the sports that grabbed the medals in previous years got the increased funding. One academic describes it as a “brutal regime, but as crude as it is effective”. In Atlanta 20 years ago, Britain won a solitary gold; this time, they are aiming for 48.

So much for de Coubertain’s ideal of the modern Olympics, about the most important thing being not the winning but the taking part. In a win-at-all-costs culture, it evokes a shrug and a sneer. Bless him, how could de Coubertin have envisaged an era when the primacy of “medalling” would see the Russian doping whistleblower in hiding somewhere in the US or performance-enhancing gene therapy as the next big challenge for the dope testers?

It’s very hard to care about the Olympics as anything more than a spectacle. All through Monday evening, Katie Taylor’s defeat led the national news bulletins: “Devastation as London 2012 gold medal winner crashes out.”

"Devastation"? Although interviewed within minutes of the verdict, she was neither sobbing nor incoherent; she spoke in her usual, honest tumble of words about a "very, very challenging year", in striking contrast to her elders' furious rounding on the judges and generally losing ugly. "Crashes out" ? She lost in a split decision. Katie Taylor is an Olympic gold medallist and always will be. No cow died, as they say in Munster after a sickening defeat.

Weight of expectation

But if this is the reaction to a razor-thin loss by a national treasure with nothing to prove, the weight of expectation driving other young boxers must be stomach- churning despite the cocky tweets. With public investment comes a sense of public ownership of performers and entitlement to medals. Combine that with the narrow, self-obsessed, all-consuming culture of elite athletics and it’s hardly surprising that the win-at-all costs pressure overwhelms so many.

Meanwhile, back in bankrupt Rio and its presidential impeachment proceedings, the final price tag of the Olympics megaproject – including direct, games-related costs, other infrastructure and ancillaries – is estimated at $20 billion, minus around $4.5 billion in revenue. That’s roughly a $15 billion deficit left behind as the International Olympic Committee nobility sweep out of town.

The Olympics is designed for wealthy nations and/or those who regard criminal waste as a badge of national pride. It’s long past time to review this scandalous farrago.