, Russia could be humiliated in its own backyard. The Olympics, a measure of national pride anywhere, means even more in Russia, heir to the vaunted Soviet teams that fought cold-war proxy battles against the West every four years. On the snow and ice of the Winter Olympics especially, the Soviets dominated, winning the most gold medals seven of the nine times they competed. With so much invested in winning, losing has produced a moment of national shame. Russia won a meager three gold medals in Vancouver, coming in sixth in the overall medal count. President Dmitri A. Medvedev has called for heads to roll and so far one has, that of the president of Russia s Olympic Committee. Russia s leaders have now staked their country s prestige on the success of the Sochi Olympic Games, and this success includes running up the medal count, which Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin has called a priority. But as the performances in Vancouver showed, even a large infusion of cash into athletics in the past several years has not been able to reverse the decay wrought by the Soviet collapse. For a primer on how a once mighty sports machine has ended up in such dire circumstances, consider the record of the luge team. The Soviet Union had about 40 luge tracks, said Valery N. Silakov, the former head coach for the Soviet luge team and the current president of the Russian Luge Federation. Now, Russian lugers have almost nowhere to train. After the Soviet Union fell, only four remained inside Russia proper, and those quickly crumbled into disrepair in the thin years of the 1990s. A new training track opened outside Moscow in 2008, but it still has problems with its cooling system. With few tracks or other training facilities and little money to train abroad until recently, athletes could not receive proper training, Mr. Silakov said, meaning few new competitors emerged from what has become known as the lost generation of Russian athletes. Russian junior athletes only began participating on all levels of the Luge World Cup about four years ago, he said. In fact, success or failure in Sochi will depend largely on athletes like Albert Demchenko, Russia s most successful luge competitor. And at 38, he is rapidly passing his prime. For the last several years, the team has depended only on me, he said by telephone from Latvia, where he was training. In six Olympics, he has never won gold, and he finished a disappointing fourth in Vancouver. There have been problems to varying degrees across the spectrum of Olympic sports, even in areas like hockey and figure skating where Russia has traditionally excelled. Going into the Vancouver Olympics, the biathlon team was one of Russia s greatest medal hopes. A steely cadre of skiers and sharpshooters trained in the wilds of Siberia, Russian biathletes have been a dominant force since the sport gained Olympic status in the 1960s. Sure enough, a Russian woman, Anastasia Kuzmina, took gold in the first biathlon event of the Vancouver Games, a 7.5-kilometer sprint. But she had been denied a spot on the Russian team after she returned from a pregnancy, so she was skiing for Slovakia, a former Soviet satellite. The best the Russian women s team could muster was a fourth-place finish. In the men s sprint event, the fastest Russian skier finished 10th, and the team s captain, Maxim Chudov, came in 63rd . Part of the problem was a doping scandal: three top biathletes were disqualified after testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs. (A Russian cross-country skier was also disqualified for doping.) Then there was the lack of training facilities and quality coaches, as well as deficiencies in athletic technology. We begin to lose before the start, said Mikhail D. Prokhorov, the billionaire businessman (and prospective owner of the New Jersey Nets basketball team) whose appointment as head of the Russian Biathlon Union in 2008 was supposed to help revive the sport. Judge for yourselves, he wrote on his blog. We don t produce skis, modern waxes and lubricants, and Russian rifles are 20 percent more inaccurate than German ones and do not correspond to international standards. The Soviet Union had athletic laboratories where engineers developed faster skis or tweaked luge sleds for optimum aerodynamics in a sport where the difference between winning a medal or not is counted in hundredt...
