Comment | The plug was pulled out of Vladimir Putin’s mega-project with little noise

If all would have gone to the Russian leader Vladimir Putin according to grandiose plans, the eyes of the sporting world would be currently focused on Moscow and Yekaterinburg, where the best athletes on the planet would compete in the Friendship Games.

However, Russia’s equivalent to the Paris Summer Olympics turned out to be nothing more than an embarrassing failure. It was decided to move the games to 2025 with chalk lines. We are now trying to explain the solution in the best possible way.

“There are very good grounds for moving the Games”, ex-boxing star and current Duma member Nikolai Valyuev argued.

The 213-centimeter and 150-kilogram Valuev was one of the most feared heavyweights of his time, but the “Beast from the East” has made his political career as Putin’s lap dog.

Putin gave last year, I issued a decree on the organization of the Friendship Games, and they were now scheduled to be held from the 15th to the 29th of September

Putin’s goal was to show that the International Olympic Committee’s decision to ban Russia’s participation in Paris had no meaning, because Russia has enough friends.

The opposite happened, even though Putin tried his best to repeat the trick of the days of the Soviet forces.

In 1984, the Soviet Union and its vassal states boycotted the Los Angeles Summer Olympics and organized their own Friendship Games. At that time, there were more than 2,300 athletes from almost 50 countries – Finland also participated and took the sailing bronze.

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Russia’s equivalent to the Paris Summer Olympics turned out to be nothing more than an embarrassing failure.

Russia tried to attract participants to the new Friendship Games with a lot of money. At the Olympics, there is only glory, but at the Friendship Games the gold medalist was promised 40,000 US dollars (36,000 euros), the silver medalist 25,000 dollars (22,500 euros) and the bronze medalist 17,000 bucks (15,300 euros).

Russia’s goal was to bring a total of around 10,000 athletes from at least 70 different countries to the Friendship Games. 283 gold medals were to be distributed.

For the Games, Russia founded its own organization as a counterpart to the International Olympic Committee. The former Secretary General of the International Football Association Fifa was recruited to the leadership of the International Association of Friendship IFA Jérôme Valckewhose career in Fifa was cut short by the 2015 corruption scandal.

In his public appearances, Valcke raved about how the IFA’s mission is to unite people and keep politics out of sports. Speeches straight from the Kremlin handbook, then.

Eventually It seems to have dawned on Putin and Valcke, as well as the other leaders of the Friendship Games, that the world is no longer the same.

Instead of the vassal states subjugated by the Soviet Union, Russia has only one friend left, Alexander Lukashenko led by Belarus.

The only other person who was enthusiastic about the Friendship Games was the Taliban regime in power in Afghanistan. Minister Abdul Umari announced to the news agency Tassi in June that Afghanistan would be happy to send athletes to the Friendship Games.

China and North Korea, which supported Russia in the war in Ukraine, also invested in Paris and sent their best athletes to the Olympics.

Building another fitness peak a month after the Olympics would be impossible, so only B and C athletes from the friendly countries of the East would have been available for Putin’s Games.

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Speeches straight from the Kremlin handbook, then.

Appointed CEO of the Friendship Games Alexey Sorokin – Russia’s 2018 World Cup headliner – withdrew his conclusion in July and resigned from his position.

A replacement was appointed Dmitri Putilinwhose merites are considerably smaller. Putilin is the president of the Russian Thai Boxing Federation.

Putilini has already pulled the brakes on the 2025 goal. He said in an interview with Tassi at the end of August that the Friendship Games might not be held until 2026. According to Putilin, everything depends on what the Russian administration decides to do for the Games.

It would not be a very big surprise if the Friendship Games were not organized in 2025 or 2026.

Guilty Friendship was quickly found for moving the Games in Russia. As usual, they were found in the west.

Putilin complained to Tassi that the International Olympic Committee’s IOC pressure affected the organizers of the Friendship Games.

Chairman of the IOC Thomas Bach in the spring, he railed against the Friendship Games and stated that they were a “cynical attempt” by the Putin regime to use sports as a tool for its politics. Bach asked all members of the Olympic movement to stay away from the Friendship Games.

The World Anti-Doping Agency, Wada, also warned athletes to stay away from the Games, the purity of which cannot be guaranteed in any way.

Although There were no winners of the Friendship Games this fall, the losers are already clear: the Russian athletes.

Many Russian stars considered the Friendship Games their main goal of the season and thought they would do well in them.

“We [uimarit] for a year we lived under the terms of the Friendship Games. A lot of people didn’t apply for neutral athlete status to get to the Olympics because of them. The cancellation is a very hard blow”, the Russian swimming world champion Andrei Minakov said to Match TV.

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The culprits for moving the Friendship Games in Russia were quickly found. As usual, they were found in the west.

Even a nationalist sports commentator Dmitry Guberniev downloaded the full version of the cancellation of the Friendship Games.

“Sports shoes. They were promised a mountain of gold as compensation for not making it to Paris,” Guberniyev said, according to Sports.ru.

According to Guberniyev, those who believed in the speeches of the Putin administration were deceived. The smart athletes didn’t believe the beautiful promises, but signed up to compete at the Paris Olympics.

That’s what happened to each other.