At a Russian Olympic Committee session in Moscow Friday, Fetisov confirmed his intention to become First Vice President, which he had first declared at his agency's board session a day before, after filing an application with ROC President Leonid Tyagachev, his long-standing arch rival in sports politics.
Apparently weary of all the criticism he faced during and after the Athens Olympics, Fetisov has now decided to take the job in the national Olympic Committee (to which he is entitled by the ROC Charter) so as to get more leverage to influence the activity of sporting federations.
For the first time in recent years, the chief of the nation's top sports agency has publicly (not privately, as has traditionally been the case) called to account the heads of a number of sporting federations for their athletes' poor showing in the Athens Olympics. He was especially harsh on the until recently immune Leonid Arkayev and Gennady Alyoshin, who head the gymnastics and the swimming federations, respectively. In his reprimand to the two men, Fetisov implicitly suggested that they should step down from their posts, pointing out metaphorically, "If you cannot resist a blow, give way for another."
Counter to expectations, the ROC Executive Committee has offered no response. Its members conferred for almost five hours Friday, but failed to do an in-depth analysis of the situation. Standing out among the speakers were Valery Kulichenko, head coach of Russia's track & field national squad, and Shamil Tarpishchev, President of the Russian Tennis Federation and captain of the men's and women's squads. The former suggested Irkutsk, in Siberia, as the best venue for training sessions in the runup to the next Olympics in Beijing, as it is located in the same time zone as the Chinese capital and has a similar climate. And the latter outlined his view as to why Russian athletes had not performed in Athens as well as they could. He put their poor showing down to insufficient government regulation, sporting federations' immunity from criticism, and the weakness of the Russian Olympic Committee. Still another problem is that the ROC statute is not fully in line with the International Olympic Committee's new Charter, which may be fraught with legal incidents in the relations between the national committee and the IOC, Tarpishchev pointed out.
