Prague, July 29 (CTK) – The doping story, due to which the Russian track and field athletes cannot go to the Rio Olympics, symbolically shows the functioning of the whole Russian society, or the production of imitations and simulacra, Jefim Fistejn has written in the latest issue of the Czech weekly Reflex.
At the Vancouver Summer Olympics in 2010, Russia had the disgraceful sixth position in the total number of medals won. But Russian President Vladimir Putin needed a result that would correspond to his ambition and to the idea that he is raising the kneeling Russia, Fistejn says.
For this reason, the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi were given thorough consideration in the Kremlin. And the result was astonishing: Russia won the games and gained 33 medals. The public could hardly imagine that the Russian sport success was a sophisticated sham in which the Russian anti-doping agency cooperated with the secret services, Fistejn writes.
Putin’s extraordinary success has been turning into a grandiose scandal, from the after-effects of which Russian sport will suffer for a long time, he writes.
Russia has always seen sport as a primarily political battlefield. Sport has been a national idea and a powerful PR instrument that Moscow presented to the world outside Russia, Fistejn writes.
He says the Games in Sochi illustrated this very well.
As we know from Putin himself now, shortly after the Olympics ended the supreme commander Putin ordered to launch the process of returning Crimea to its home, Russia. During the wave of the Russian national enthusiasm and the respectful admiration from foreigners, the seizure of the Ukrainian peninsula looked like a children’s game, Fistejn writes.
Because the Olympics were used as a smoke screen, all Putin’s men participated in its organisation, he says.
After the Olympics, the World Anti-Doping Agency called Sochi a significant divide in the development of the Olympic anti-doping programme, Fistejn writes.
He quotes Russian opposition journalist Ilya Faibisovich as saying that whole Russia pulled together in the doping fraud.
“It was this enthusiasm and amazement at their own omnipotence that paved the road to the murdering of thousands of people: Ukrainians, passengers of the Malaysian Boeing, paratroopers from Pskov, to the suffering of tens and hundreds of thousands of people,” Fistejn cites Faibisovich as saying.
Who would have objections that the hospitable, talented, sparkling and so very successful Russia takes a piece of somebody else’s territory? Fistejn writes.
He says Russia is a suitcase with a false bottom and all works in the country like this.
Russian athletes imitated successes and victories that were only based on deception and chemistry. The top Russian sport officials imitated an effort to investigate the violations, but there was nothing they could investigate because they took part in the frauds themselves, Fistejn writes.
Putin imitated his outrage, but he primarily sought to save the culprits whom he entrusted with examining their own crimes, Fistejn says.
A war has been fought in Ukraine, but no Russian troops have allegedly been fighting there. Elections are held in Russia, but no choice can be made by voters. The country has an economy, but there is nothing but oil. There are Russian television channels, but no truth. There is the Orthodox Church, but neither faith nor morality, Fistejn writes.
There is the Russian state, but it is nothing but the Ozero dacha community from which Putin recruits his oligarchic entourage, he says.
The country is without friends, Crimea is without a bridge to mainland Russia, the nation is without a will, the autocratic ruler is without a replacement, Fistejn writes.
When all society is dependent on doping, why only athletes are blamed? he says.
