THE COLUMN: The Olympic events of 30 years ago in the former Soviet Union, and the ups and downs of the “Putin era”

Just over a week ago, at an international hockey tournament in Moscow, the Russian national team invaded the ice wearing the uniform of the Soviet national team and the inscription on the chest “CCCP”, the well-known abbreviation of the Russian name of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

The Russian Ice Hockey Federation specified the jerseys used in the game against Finland (a match that would ultimately lose 3-2) honored the 75th anniversary of its founding.

But the event also coincided with the 65th anniversary of the USSR’s first Olympic gold medal in that sport.

After that first time, the Soviets won another seven Olympic titles, the last one already under the label of “Unified Team” in Barcelona, and almost two dozen world championships.

At the same time, the tournament in Moscow a few days ago was played just three decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

On December 25, 1991, the hammer and sickle flag was replaced by the Russian tricolor on the Kremlin building. Moments earlier, Mikhail Gorbachev had announced his resignation, and a day later the USSR was formally dissolved.

From before, the then President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Juan Antonio Samaranch, did not hide his concern about the political and social events in a country that he knew well, having served as the Soviet ambassador of Spain for three years.

In the summer of 1991 Samaranch had traveled to Havana for the XI Pan American Games, five years after his last visit when, unsuccessfully, he tried to convince the ruling Fidel Castro to allow Cuban athletes to attend the Olympic Games in Seoul, after their absence from Los Angeles.

Two years earlier, Gorbachev had been to Cuba, Moscow’s main ally in the Western Hemisphere. His reforms caused displeasure in the Cuban leadership. In the island the danger of extinction of the USSR began to be noticed. The eastern communist bloc began to dissolve.

In Havana, the Pan American Games were held amid frequent “blackouts” (power cuts) in homes. Places in the city that were hosting competitions were sometimes the only illuminated sites in those neighborhoods. Soviet oil had stopped entering Cuba as it had before.

In a private comment Samaranch understood also on the communist island they were very concerned about the fate of the USSR.

Shortly after his return to Lausanne, the attempted coup of the hard-wing of the Communist Party of the USSR took place in Moscow. At Christmas 1991, when there were only a few days left before the official invitations to the Barcelona Olympic Games from the IOC headquarters, the Commonwealth of Independent States was born. In practice, the USSR no longer existed, after the internal political crisis, the loss of the Baltic countries and the successive declarations of independence of their republics.

“Samaranch felt the Barcelona Games as his Games and he could not run the risk that they would be played without the presence of the great athletes of the former USSR. Without them, in terms of sport, the Barcelona Games would be considered second level,” this from the book President Samaranch, the 21 years of the IOC Presidency that changed sport "

The Olympic leader “was willing to travel anywhere, to meet with anyone to negotiate until the last minute” the participation of athletes and teams from the former Soviet republics.

The book mentions discreet interventions by former members of the KGB, the Soviet secret service, to pave the way for high-level diplomatic efforts with the intervention of Western foreign ministries and high-ranking officials.

The IOC president held meetings in the Kremlin with Boris Yeltsin, the new Russian president, to ensure the presence of athletes, except those from the Baltic states that had already rejoined the Olympic Movement.

In the negotiations with Yeltsin, Samaranch declares “the IOC continues its policy of flexibility to adapt to geopolitical developments.”

Mediated by IOC Vice President Vitaly Smirnov (now 83 years old), Samaranch traveled to Moscow on January 25, 1992 to close the deal with Yeltsin, a decision ratified by the IOC Executive Commission on February 3.

The Russian Olympic Committee had been created on December 28, 1991 and recognized two years later. Smirnov became their first president.

On March 9, in Lausanne, Samaranch met with the leaders of the Olympic Committees of the former Soviet republics who had asked the IOC for recognition.

After hours of negotiation, the IOC ensures the athletes’ attendance at the Albertville and Barcelona Olympic events under the name of Unified Team (EUN) or Commonwealth of Independent States (CEI).

At the Winter Olympics in the French city of Albertville, in February 1992, the EUN was represented by Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan and placed second in the medal table behind the Unified Germany.

In the Summer Games in Barcelona, 12 of the 15 former Soviet republics, with the exception of the three Baltics, made up the delegation, and finished in first place in the medal table.

As of January 1, 1993, each republic was able to act independently in all competitions. That same day the IOC announced that the provisional association known as EUN ceased to exist and that a new map was being born with the presence of 12 NOCs to replace the old Soviet power, the book on Samaranch relates.

History records the event as a diplomatic-sporting victory, however the new Olympic geography began to worry not a few NOCs of developing countries that recognized more complications for their options to the podium after the multiplication of former Soviet athletes while they warned about refereeing balance in certain sports.

25 years ago, on the occasion of its Olympic Games in Atlanta, the United States took advantage of the farewell of the USSR to retake the leadership of the summer Olympic events, briefly interrupted in Beijing 2008 when the Chinese won the most gold medals, but not the most total medals.

Eight years after that of December 25, 1991, a former KGB officer, Vladimir Putin, came to power in Russia with the illusion of returning to that country, the largest in the world, the role of superpower.

And sport had a prominent place on his agenda. In this sense, Russia gradually achieved important events such as the World Athletics World Cup (2013), the Winter Olympic Games (2014), the Swimming World Cup (2015), the ice hockey World Cup (2016), the football World Cup ( 2018) and the boxing World Cup in 2019.

But doping scandals truncated that goal at a climactic moment and severely tarnished the country’s image: due to cheating, Russian athletes were stripped of more than 50 Olympic medals in the last five years and Moscow was forced to repeatedly deny, with Putin at the top, the institutional dimension of an illicit system.

While waiting for the two-year sanction imposed by the Court of Arbitration for Sport to be completed in December 2022, for which Russia cannot compete as a country or use its national symbols in the Olympic and Paralympic Games, the Russian authorities are insisting on the last months in the idea of aspiring to the 2036 Summer Olympics.

A project that, in addition to being inserted in the process of rescuing the prestige of Russian sport, forces us to remember the already distant Games organized in Moscow in 1980, a time when the former Soviet Union was leading the medal table.