Most Russian citizens are dissatisfied with the results of the national team at the Olympics. Before the start of the final week of the London Olympics it became clear that the Russian team will not fulfil the medal targets voiced many times and will fail to fight for the third position in the medal count with the hosts of the Olympics.
The survey, which the Integration foundation jointly with the agency NewsEffector conducted, 69% of Russian citizens are dissatisfied with the results of the Russian Olympic team to various degrees, the RBC daily reported.
On the average one out of five people find the Russian performance as “a complete failure”. 21% of respondents have chosen this variant. The option that “this is an unexpectedly bad result” describes in the best way the response of people to Russian Olympic achievements and 48% of pollsters believe so.
The heads of the Russian Olympic delegation, namely Sport Minister Vitaly Mutko and President of the Russian Olympic Committee Alexander Zhukov told press conferences about a new criterion for the success of the Olympic team, which they are apparently planning to use after the return to the homeland, the Moskovskiye Novosti daily noted. According to their version, it is more correct not to take into account the gold medals, but the total number of medals in order to assess the Olympic performance. The Russian Olympic team has really many medals.
Right a week before the end of the London Olympics the Russian national team has 35 medals, including four gold medals, 16 silver medals and 15 bronze medals. The results are remarkable right in several interpretations. First, Russia outpaces the United States in the number of silver medals and China in the number of bronze medals. Secondly, no national team has such a low proportion of the gold medals to the overall number of medals that makes just 11%. For comparison, China and the Koreans – about 50%, the US – just 45%, Kazakhstan, which is higher than Russia in the medal count has the 100% ratio.
If to formulate the problem in one sentence, this is the following, a high-class, well trained team arrived in London and is ready to fight for the highest medals, but right for several reasons is not ready to die for victory, the newspaper believes.
Russian fans did not expect much from the first Olympic week, the Trud newspaper reported. It used to happen that our Olympic athletes do not win many medals at the beginning of the Olympics. The scope of kinds of sport, in which Russia does not win many medals, is getting larger. But Russian fans pined some hopes on the medals in shooting, weightlifting, probably artistic gymnastics, swimming and rowing. From the Soviet times these kinds of sports were traditionally considered as the sports, in which national athletes win many medals. But alas, by the middle of the Olympics the Russian national team has won only four gold medals. All gold medals were won by wrestlers, three of them by judoists. The experts noted that Russian athletes lack the drive for victory.