Shameful Results of the Beijing Olympics for the Ministry of Sports

Belarus ranked below New Zealand on the medal table.

"We should do our best and show the whole world that the Belarusians know how to win," Aliaksandr Lukashenka admonished the athletes on the eve of the Olympics, reports Salidarnasts.

But this time, there is nothing much to show. Our countrymen will not bring any gold medals from Beijing. Even New Zealand has the gold just like 20 other countries. We don't.

Let's compare the current results with previous Olympics:

Vancouver 2010 - 1 gold + 1 silver + 1 bronze medal.

Sochi 2014 - 5 gold + 1 bronze.

Pyeongchang 2018 - 2 gold + 1 silver.

The results in Turin-2006 were even worse than in Beijing-2022 when the Belarusians had only one silver medal.

But could it have been better?

Traditionally, our hopes rested on the biathlon and freestyle. We had high expectations, especially for the shooting skiers: Anna Sola and Dinara Alymbekova (pictured) had an amazing start to the season. The latter was one shot away from gold in the women's race at the Olympics, but her miss not only cost her the gold medal, but also her place on the podium. Sola was great in the pursuit race but missed 10 seconds to the bronze.

The biathlon would have been a complete disappointment if Anton Smolsky had not suddenly shot like a robot in the men's race. The Belarusian finished second in the individual race.

The Belarusian freestyle skiing approached the Olympics in a depressed state. The legendary coach Nikolai Kozeko and the best domestic athlete of 2019, Alexandra Romanovskaya, were removed from the national team for criticizing the violence of the authorities after the presidential campaign. The rest have kept silent and continued to work, but the blow to the team was too strong.

Before the start of the Games, the possibility of our freestylers coming back from the 2022 Games without any medals looked very real. However, luck still smiled on the flying skiers. It is symbolic that Anna Guskova, who signed the letter of the free athletes demanding a new presidential election in Belarus, won a medal.

All in all, one could have come back from Beijing with one gold medal or no medals at all. It turned out to be something in between.

The performance of the Belarusians at the Olympics testifies to the stagnation in the national sport. And we are not only talking about the Winter Games, which are coming to an end. In Tokyo-2021, the country showed the worst result in the history of the summer Olympics - only seven medals, including one gold (trampoline).

Given how high sports are on the list of priorities of the current ruler of Belarus, we can talk about the inefficiency of the system of management of this sector, which was built under his leadership. Most sports are in decline (football, for example); even the "branded" biathlon and freestyle do not bring the same results as before.

The main defeat is that the sport that used to unite the Belarusians is now dividing them. Many fans rejoice not at victories, but at the failures of those athletes who support the current authorities. The split in society is so deep that even the Olympics will not be able to extinguish it.