Olympic Star Is Dimming in the Soviet Union

The vast athletic machine of the Soviet Union is in trouble. Where there was stability, there is chaos. Where there was money, there are open palms. Where there was success, there is impending failure. Where there was pride, there is helplessness. Where there was arrogance, there is resignation.

The most dominant and feared power in the modern history of international sports is teetering under the pressures of historic reform and change. Not only is money scarce, so is food, equipment and benefactors. Soviet Olympic Committee President Vitaly Smirnov is talking like a capitalist: trying to find sponsors, streamlining, discussing financial incentives.

Some of the nation’s very best athletes and coaches are fleeing to the West to find financial stability in a potentially devastating “Brawn Drain.” The Baltic Republics, including basketball-rich Lithuania, are talking about seceding from the Soviet Olympic Committee and forming their own teams.

And nearly every official or athlete wonders what will become of the children -- and, then, what will happen to the future of the Soviet Olympic movement.

To an outsider, the Soviet sports machine inspires awe. These are the grim superhumans who win almost everything at the Olympics. Their incredible hockey teams, that controversial 1972 basketball team, even little Olga Korbut -- what domination! Didn’t every U.S. child first hear the Soviet national anthem on an Olympic telecast, and then hear it over and over again?

Since it joined the Olympic movement in 1952, the Soviet Union has won 1,212 medals, more than any other country. Overall, only the United States has won more total medals (1,904), but Americans have been competing since the modern Olympics began in 1896.

The Soviets probably will win their usual complement of medals at the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, France, and in the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona. Few within the Soviet Union or outside of it dispute that.

“The athletes are already in place,” said Yuri Titov, winner of nine Olympic medals in gymnastics, a Soviet sports bureaucrat for two decades and the president of the International Gymnastics Federation. “They already are traveling, receiving the best coaching, working in the training camps.”

But most of these same officials, coaches and athletes agree that by the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, when today’s children have become tomorrow’s Olympians, the Soviets will falter.

The reasons are many, but they begin with this: The nation’s vast sports apparatus has been unable to insulate itself from the disarray and despair that mark all facets of life in the Soviet Union these days.

“Everything in sports reflects those matters the country is undergoing in all areas: economic, political and social,” said Nikolai Lents, secretary general of the Soviet Olympic Committee. “You can’t be in the Soviet Union and live on the moon.”

Things are so bad the Olympic Committee doesn’t have the money to pay for publication of its own glossy magazine. It used to pay hard currency, not the nearly worthless ruble, to a Hungarian company. Now, hard currency is in such short supply, the most recent issue came out last year, and Lents said there are no plans for another.

To be sure, sports still are very important to the Soviets. The daily circulation of Sovietsky Sport, the national sports daily, is 3 million. Athletes live better than average citizens, although neither group approaches what would be the equivalent of the United States’ middle class. Olympic swimming superstar Vladimir Salnikov, for instance, lives in a small apartment with one bedroom, where his son’s crib sits beside the bed he and his wife sleep in.

Most devastating, the vaunted sports schools and clubs -- the backbone of the nation’s athletic system -- are undergoing difficult financial times, losing coaches, closing their doors.

One trade union, Bryansk, cut the financing of 25 sports schools around the nation. At the Moscow Red Army gymnastics club, four coaches left to find better-paying jobs. And in the city of Liebsk, the sports club was in such bad financial shape it was raising tulips, gladiolas, roses and vegetables to sell to try to fund a recreational park. The park will include pinball machines -- an uncharacteristic Soviet source of revenue.

The root of the financial problems is the crisis in the Soviet economy. The ruble recently was devalued from six to 27 to the U.S. dollar, although various other rates of exchange can be found and any comparison to the U.S. dollar is inexact. Nevertheless, when dealing with the outside world, the Soviets are losing buying power. In sports, where the market truly is global, this hits Soviet sports especially hard.

For example, the national rowing team had its eye on a new eight-man shell on a visit to the United States. The price was $20,000. The Soviets didn’t have the cash and rubles wouldn’t do. So they couldn’t buy the shell.

Against this financial backdrop is a reorganization. The Soviet Olympic Committee, once a part of the government sports operation, has broken away and soon will move to a separate building.

The physical move is accompanied by fiscal change. The sports ministry still funds Olympic sports through the money it receives as a branch of the government, sports lotteries and sponsorships, but there is concern the lottery money is dwindling. What’s more, what is left of it might be siphoned off for more basic needs, such as education.

Meanwhile, individual sports federations have been encouraged to break away from the old comrade network and begin to support themselves, as they do in the United States. Soccer and track and field already have, and many of the others would like to follow.

Igor Ter-Ovanesian, president of the prestigious track and field federation, must give 7 percent of the hard currency his sport receives from the West to the government sports ministry. He and his athletes can keep the rest. It used to be that top Soviet athletes had to give back 80 percent of what they made in the West to their federation. This became such a source of consternation that the better-traveled athletes, especially tennis players, began defying the rules. Now an athlete such as pole vaulter Sergei Bubka keeps all but the 10 percent he gives to the track-and-field federation, Ter-Ovanesian said.

With money getting tighter, Smirnov, the Olympic Committee president and a member of the International Olympic Committee, is becoming impatient. When the government took care of him and his sports, there were few worries. Now, in this age of creeping capitalism, he wants results.

“We recently sent our rowing team to the world championships in Australia,” he said. “It cost us $300,000 and we got one medal. What’s the reason for this?”

Top Soviet sports officials agree the only solution is sponsorship -- a word they do not even bother to translate into Russian.

These officials travel the world; they are wise to the ways of sports marketing in the 1990s, especially what has happened with television revenues in the United States. Said Smirnov: “We have one big problem. Our television is government owned and operated. We do not get a single ruble from television.”

Sports and Olympic officials are not the only ones who are aware of the money being made in sports in the West. Well-traveled Soviet athletes and coaches also notice -- and they are leaving in bunches. Bubka, the nation’s best-known athlete, said last month he plans to move to France this year because of the “unstable” conditions in the Soviet Union. He would still compete for his homeland.

A half dozen water polo players have left for contracts with clubs in Europe; 1988 Olympic gymnastics star Vladimir Artemov is coaching American children in Stroudsburg, Pa.; top rowing coach Igor Grinko is training the U.S. national sculling team on the Occoquan River outside Washington, D.C. The “Brawn Drain” is most noticeable in hockey, where 13 Soviets have left for the NHL.

“Our only resolution to the problem is to create conditions not equal to, but close to what they are leaving for,” said first deputy chairman of the government sports ministry, Leonid Drachevsky.

This doesn’t appear possible right now, so the Soviets put their own spin on the situation. “It helps us for them to learn the American techniques,” Drachevsky said.

This is new. For decades, when the Soviets were dominating U.S. athletes, the cry was that the Soviets were the masters of training and secrecy -- and Americans were dying to find out how they did it.

No one believes the Soviet Olympiv machine will fall apart; the Soviets care too much and are too proud for that. But it will undergo difficult times.

Said Ter-Ovanesian: “Economically, we can’t give you fresh meat or fresh food, but we have a strong coaching program. We know how to train you. That’s not everything, but it is something.”