Russia set for golden Games
President Putin hoping grand opening ceremony will put freeze on militant threats and ongoing gay rights controversy
TOKYO: Sara Takanashi, just 17 years old and 150cm tall, is blazing a trail in women’s ski jumping with a record World Cup win ahead of her sport’s Olympic debut.
But the Japanese schoolgirl carrying the weight of her country’s limited gold medal hopes at the Sochi Games says she is too concerned about improving her own jumps to care much about her place in the record books.
“I usually think about how I can enjoy jumping rather than the record,” Takanashi said on Sunday when she clinched her eighth victory from nine World Cup events contested so far this season.
“I want to work harder still and raise my level higher and higher,” she told reporters in Zao, north of Tokyo.
On January 11 in Sapporo, she broke the previous mark of 13 wins set by world champion Sarah Hendrickson.
The 19-year-old American, the winner of the inaugural women’s World Cup overall title in the 2011-12 season, is recovering from a ligament injury after a fall in August.
She is hoping to compete again this month.
Takanashi, who was beaten into second spot by Hendrickson at last year’s worlds after dominating the 2012-13 World Cup tour, believes the American’s comeback will spur her on.
“She is an athlete I admire very much,” Takanashi said of Hendrickson before the World Cup weekend in Sapporo.
Apart from Hendrickson, Austrian Jacqueline Seifriedsberger has been idle after a training fall in December.
Takanashi’s feat also bested the national record of 16 career World Cup wins set by Noriaki Kasai in the men’s category.
“I believe the level of the women’s competition will rise by leaps and bounds,” said Kasai, still active on the World Cup tour at age 41.
“I wish Sara will keep on winning in the meantime.” – Sapa-AFP USSIA on February 7 opens one of the most politically explosive Olympic Games since the Cold War, with concerns over the risk of militant attacks and a controversy over gay rights threatening to overshadow the winter sports extravaganza.
The world’s best skiers, skaters and sliders will descend on Russia’s southern resort of Sochi for what promises to be two weeks of enthralling clashes between sports legends and new stars.
Yet these Games have always had an unmistakable political hue after President Vladimir Putin personally championed the 2007 bid to host the event in Sochi, a resort at the foot of the Caucasus mountains close to the hotbed of an Islamist insurgency and a short drive north of the rebel Georgian region of Abkhazia.
Many scoffed at the idea of Russia holding the Games in the temperate S o v i e t - s t y l e resort that back in 2007 had next to no serious sports infrastructure at sea level or in the once almost virgin mountains above where the snow sports are to take place.
But $50 billion (R540bn) later, half of it from the Russian budget and half from the private sector, the dream has now become a reality with new roads, hotels and sports infrastructure enveloping the coastline and mountains.
Putin has staked his reputation on holding a safe, well-run and enjoyable Games, which will be the biggest event for Russians since Moscow hosted the Olympic Games under the Soviet Union in 1980.
“It is not to do with my personal ambitions. It is in the direct interest of the state and our people,” Putin has said.
“After the collapse of the USSR and the bloody events in the Caucasus the general condition of our society was pessimistic and depressing. We needed to buck ourselves up. To understand … that we could realise big, extensive projects.”
Putin wants the Games to show off Russia to the world as a strong and dynamic power. But the fragility of this ambi-
Rtion was underlined in December when 34 people were killed and more than 100 wounded in successive suicide bombings in the southern city of Volgograd. Doku Umarov, the chief of militants in the Caucasus, which wants to impose an Islamist state in the region, threatened in July to stage attacks to stop the Games.
As if these problems were not enough, Russia managed to create a huge controversy of its own design last year by adopting legislation banning the dissemination of “gay propaganda” to minors.
Denounced by activists as a homophobic outrage, the law prompted calls for a boycott of the Games and means Russia’s stance on gay rights will be scrutinised for the duration of the Olympics.
The Games will get under way with a lavish opening ceremony on February 7 at the Fisht stadium in Sochi.
However, many world leaders such as US President Barack Obama and French leader Francois Hollande will be absent in what some see as a snub to Russia but which Russian officials insist is just normal protocol.
In a sign of some sensitivity to Western concerns ahead of the Games, Putin in December pardoned Russia’s best known prisoner, the anti-Kremlin tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and approved an amnesty freeing two Pussy Riot feminist punk rockers.
Russia has initially indicated it would ban all protests in Sochi during the Games but then appeared to bow to pressure by allowing rallies in a specially designated area.
But activists have ridiculed the idea as the zone is in the suburb of Khosta around 18km from the Olympic Cluster.
“The authorities need to stop harassing activists or risk further tarnishing an Olympics already marred by controversy,” said Jane Buchanan, Europe and Central Asia associate director at Human Rights Watch.
She added that the International Olympic Committee “had done a huge disservice to Russian activists by not challenging the Russian authorities” over protests.
Stop harassing activists or risk further tarnishing
the Olympics