The Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) unveiled on Friday a team of renowned international experts it hopes will show Russia the way to the top of the medals table at the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics.
Russia ended the Vancouver Games with its worst Winter Olympic medal tally in history, winning just three golds, five silvers and seven bronzes to finish 11th in the overall table.
To avoid similar disappointment at the Sochi Games the ROC invited three leading sports experts to devise a program to improve the Russian Olympic team's performance.
"The concept of this project will be less about what the coach has to do with the athlete and more about what the ROC and sports federations need to do in support of the athletes and coaches. So we will look at the management of all things: financial management, human resources," former IOC marketing director Michael Payne said at a conference hosted by RIA Novosti.
Payne said that correct "marketing measures" was at the heart of a plan to boost preparations for the Olympic Games by improving cooperation of the main players involved in their preparation.
"The role of marketing is to serve the sports agenda by building partnerships with core communities that will bring in more resources that will then allow the athletes and management - whether it's in coaching or sports medicine - to improve the system," he said.
Payne said exact marketing measures will ensure success for the Olympic team as they did ahead of the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002 when a competent sports performance structure delivered serious results in relatively short period of time, only four years before the Olympics.
One of the experts, Steve Roush, a former U.S. Olympic team official responsible for preparations for the Beijing Games, said the idea of the project was to take best practices from around the world by looking at the methods used and the systems put in place in various countries.
"These practices will allow the athletes to focus and train without distractions towards achieving personal bests at the Olympic Games. With this project...the facilitation of the development of the athletes can be enhanced," the senior consultant to Russian Olympic committee said.
Lars Haue-Pedersen, managing director of leading sports consulting company TSE, said adjusting a few details only in field of play would not be enough to improve the performance.
"It is really important what happens outside the play, how the organizations structures deliver the results, how the national Olympic committees and various sports federations cooperate," Haue-Pedersen said.
The experts said the main role of their project would be to look at different countries' most successful Olympic results and studying the structures and experiences of the Olympic committees, and then to put these examples into a Russian context.
"It does not make sense to copy the system from one country to another since each country is different, different geography, traditions, strong and weaker sides," Haue-Pedersen said, stressing that their recommendations would be specific to Russia.
MOSCOW, April 16 (RIA Novosti)
