Russia to resolve lack of Winter Olympics training facilities

© RIA Novosti . Aleksey Druginin / Go to the mediabankVitaly Mutko
Vitaly Mutko - Sputnik International
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Russia's sports minister, who nearly lost his job due to the Russian team's poor performance at the Vancouver Olympics, said on Monday that training facilities for all winter disciplines would be built in Russian regions in 18 months

Russia's sports minister, who nearly lost his job due to the Russian team's poor performance at the Vancouver Olympics, said on Monday that training facilities for all winter disciplines would be built in Russian regions in 18 months.

The Russian team finished this year's games with its worst Winter Olympic medal tally in history and there is intense pressure on officials and athletes to ensure that a similar situation is avoided when Russia's Black Sea resort of Sochi hosts the 2014 Winter Games.

Vitaly Mutko put the lack of medals down to "serious defects in the system for preparing athletes."

"First of all, we have to solve the problem of [training facilities] for new winter sports disciplines, such as freestyle skiing, snowboarding, biathlon and skiing. We are now building such a center in Toksovo [in northwestern Russia]," the minister said.

"We are also building a serious sports cluster in the Perm Territory [in the Urals] for the first time. There will be the whole range of ski jumping hills, including K-40, K-70, K-95 and K-120," he said.

He added that with other facilities in the Urals also under construction, they will form "a powerful center of ski jumping and Nordic combined."

Mutko said the training center at Novogorsk some 6 km from Moscow would also be expanded, to include facilities for short track speed skating, figure skating, hockey and curling.

"So, with [facilities in] the Ergaki mountain range in [Siberia's] Krasnoyarsk territory added, we will solve the problem of training facilities for winter disciplines in barely a year and a half," he said.

After the 2010 Games, when Russia won just three golds and finished 11th in the medal table, President Dmitry Medvedev urged senior sports officials responsible for the failure to "make a courageous decision" and leave their posts.

Russia's Olympic Committee head Leonid Tyagachyov followed the president's advice and turned in his resignation two days after Medvedev's statement. Mutko resisted heavy pressure to resign on the grounds that Russian skiers "won't race quicker if someone is fired."

To avoid another failure at the home Sochi Games the Russian Olympic Committee invited three leading sports experts to devise a program to improve the Russian Olympic team's performance.

MOSCOW, June 7 (RIA Novosti)

 

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