Ex-Soviets Stage Last Hurrah in Barcelona

The superpower that selected and trained them is dead. Their future is uncertain. Yet, day after day, new medals pour in to salute an extraordinary un-team of athletes who once wore the fearsome red of the Soviet Union.

As stars of the Games of the XXV Olympiad, they are staging what may be the greatest last hurrah in sports history.

Athletes of what is euphemistically called the Unified Team, representing the Commonwealth of Independent States, have won 84 medals, 10 more than the Americans--and many more than even the officials who led them to Barcelona imagined possible. On Sunday, closing day here, the Unified Team dies, and with it the Soviet sports system that was once--whatever its excesses--the world’s most successful medal factory.

What is driving the former Soviets here in Spain is old-fashioned pride and hopes of catching a ride on a newfangled gravy train, say officials and athletes themselves.

There’s dollars in them thar golds. But there is also a lot of humanity.

“I think at the most basic level, there is a question of loyalty to their team and their coaches,” said Sergei Chistyakov, a Moscow-based editor for Tass, the news service. “They are committed to their sports, and they have been trained to do well.”

Still, athletes who dream of another Olympic lifetime in Atlanta in ’96 find themselves wondering aloud what their training and lifestyles will be like in the meantime, they tell reporters.

“When the Olympics end, the women’s basketball team will be disbanded forever,” said Vladimir Geskine, deputy editor of Sports Express, a Moscow newspaper. “Some members will later play for Russia, some for Ukraine. But how about the one who must play for Kazakhstan? She will never play at the same level again--and who will ever see her play?”

As former Soviet teams are disbanded, athletes will fall under the authority of fledgling sports programs in more than a dozen smaller republics, all of which have many more pressing priorities than sports. In team sports, particularly, overall quality will fall quickly and dramatically, according to Geskine.

“The results so far are good because of the power of the Soviet sports system,” he said. “But after Sunday, I fear there will be a huge drop that will last for many years, even for Russia. Some of the republics can look forward to competing in future Olympics at around the same level as Fiji.”

In Seoul four years ago, he noted, 12 Lithuanian athletes won medals. Here in Barcelona, the independent nation of Lithuania has won one gold medal, in the men’s discus, and the winner is a product of the Soviet system.

“For the new republics to start sports programs on the Soviet system will be the equivalent of each one starting its own space program,” Geskine said.

One gold-medal gymnast will compete in the future for Belarus, meaning he will no longer have access to the special facilities near Moscow used for years to train all Soviet gymnasts under the best coaches drawn from the entire Soviet Union.

Specialized high-altitude training facilities in the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia and Armenia were unavailable to even this last-gasp team because of local unrest. And the entire Soviet ski team used to train in what is now the independent nation of Estonia.

“People see what is coming, so they are naturally worried about money--the future of their families,” Chistyakov, the Tass editor, said. “They want to attract foreign coaches and contracts, get sponsorship by big companies.”

Elena Romanova won the gold medal in the women’s 3,000 meters but declined a chance to run again in the 1,500.

“I have to put food on the table,” she said. “It’s time to finish with the Olympics and earn money competing in tournaments.”

Sometimes, the pressures and uncertainties cloud judgments. A weightlifter dismissed a bronze medal, saying it would take a gold to generate the kind of money and sponsorship he needed to keep his family.

To cheer on the shards, organizers of the Unified Team are paying $3,000 for a gold medal, $2,000 for a silver and $1,000 for a bronze--and Unified Team organizers reportedly are running out of money to pay these off, since they, like the rest of the world, underestimated badly what their medal count would be.

Back home, the media in Moscow are making hay about the medals won by Unified Team athletes. But the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, for one, wonders at the spectacle and worries about the future: “It is sometimes too strange to see three guys in the same uniform up on the pedestal. One can see that they are from one country, one team, but above them are three different flags. . . . What will happen after the full division in sports?”

One swimming coach says he will open a school in Russia. But who is there to pay for his services? And it is no secret that once-forbidden greener athletic pastures abroad are now a driving fact of life for many former Soviet athletes.

Then, too, it is painfully clear to everybody that as one era ends here in bittersweet Barcelona, another begins for the athletes who once played under the hammer and sickle.

The sports commissars and their political policemen are gone, good riddance. But they have already been replaced by a new breed. Dogging the steps of the Unified Team as it plays itself into history is a whole new breed of sports bureaucrats: 11 national Olympic committees jockeying for space and acceptance under the Spanish sun; 11 different rookie ministers of sports, all dreaming of international glory to come.

It may not be sports that is best served in the new era that is dawning, warns Geskine, noting that the new central Asian republic of Turkmenistan has one athlete on the Unified Team--and 10 sports bureaucrats gadding about Barcelona.

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