A few weeks ago I wrote that Ukraine could have a blond 40-something leading the country and the soccer team by the end of February. Instead, in both cases, a man from eastern Ukraine won out. The new boss of the national side, Myron Markevych, is actually from Lviv region, but the 59-year-old has plied his trade in recent years as boss of Kharkiv’s Metallist team.
Just like the end of the presidential elections, his appointment has not put an end to the circus surrounding the contenders for the top post. And the ringmasters of that circus also happen to be powerful businessmen.
The two dominant figures in Ukrainian soccer – Shakhtar Donetsk kingpin Rinat Akhmetov and head of the Ukrainian Football Federation Hryhoriy Surkis – are getting stuck into each other again in a very public spat. The two clashed at the end of last year over everything from ticket prices to Surkis’ attempts to lure Shakhtar’s coach Mircea Lucescu to work for the national team.
After Markevych was appointed on Feb.1, Surkis told reporters that the best coach for the Ukrainian national side would have been Mircea Lucescu. Hardly a way to build confidence in your new coach as the team prepares for the Euro-2012 tournament on home turf. Akhmetov, of course, didn’t miss the chance to stick one to his rival.
“It’s ugly and unprofessional,” said Ukraine’s richest man. “It demonstrates that Surkis has neither brains nor conscience. I think Markevych took the post in order to help, not in order to be humiliated.”
Surkis hit back, saying his comments had been misinterpreted by the media.
Things are no less fraught over at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Ukraine’s disappointing performances continued, and the team is yet to claim a medal.
But at least the lack of medals hasn’t led to calls for ministerial resignations and a crisis of national self-confidence, as in Russia. After claims from the head of the Olympic Committee that the team could bag as many as 30 medals, the team’s current haul of 13, including only three golds, led nationalist members of the Russian parliament last week to call for the dismissal of the country’s leading sports officials. One lawmaker called the performance an “insult.” The latest flop came on Feb. 24 when the men’s hockey team, a major medal hope, was thrashed 7-3 in the quarter-final by Canada.
Parliament speaker Boris Gryzlov, a senior figure in Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party, said anything less than a fourth-place finish (the team is currently 10th) in the final standings “would be a failure for those who are responsible for sports in our country.” Heads, it seems inevitable, will roll.
There is, of course, nothing worse than to lose to the United States. Figure skater Yevgeny Plyushchenko took silver behind the Evan Lysacek after the American’s more conservative program scored higher points than the Russian’s riskier performance. Putin wrote Plyushchenko in a telegram that his silver medal was worth gold. The Communist Party of St. Petersburg went further, suggesting the defeat was part of a U.S. plot. “Everyone versed in world politics knows that Canada never enjoyed genuine sovereignty. It’s a U.S. colony and all the judges [of the figure skating competition] are under the White House’s thumb,” said the organization’s leader, Sergei Malinkovych. He called on the U.S. to be banned from competing when Russia hosts the Games in Sochi in 2014, saying, “The air will be cleaner without the Americans in Sochi!”
Bizarre conspiracy theories aside, the connection between sport and power in Russia is perhaps more prominent than in any other country in the world.
Only a few years ago, we heard how Russia’s success in soccer and hockey was evidence of the country’s resurgence as a global power. Before an important soccer match in 2007, then-Prime Minister Victor Zubkov said, “They have 11 players, and we have 11 players. They have two arms and two hands and one head each, and we have the same. But do you know what the most important thing is? We, Russians, won World War II. And we were the first in space.”
International sport during the Soviet period served as a way of proving the superiority of the Soviet system. The victories of individual athletes were the collective achievements of the Soviet ideology and the Soviet people. The collapse of the Soviet Union brought an end to the powerful system built over decades that helped to nurture top athletes, and the poor performances in Vancouver are in part a result of that decline.
But Russians continue to receive ideological succor from sporting achievements, and leaders depend on them as a reflection of their success in creating a powerful nation. Victories on the field of sport transcend catastrophic living standards, but defeats undermine the system that depends on such projections of power, which is why Russian leaders get so tetchy.
It’s telling that while Russian politicians this month were still yearning for the sporting glories of the Soviet Union, their Ukrainian counterparts barely gave as much as a nod to the winter Olympics, busy playing a completely different game.
Kyiv Post staff writer James Marson can be reached at [email protected].
