Will the BRICS Winter Games help Tatarstan athletes update their infrastructure?

Luck and work will grind everything down

The main topic of the speech by the Minister of Sports of Tatarstan Vladimir Leonov at Athlete of the Year solemn ceremony and the final board meeting was the topic of material and technical support for athletes. Large-scale construction of sports facilities in the capital and regions of the republic continues, in other words, conditions have been created for mass sports. At the same time, professionals are increasingly concerned about the issues of providing sports equipment.

“If we provided financial support to the regions, it was indirect, for example, in the transfer of some equipment, of which we have little, in fact, the most used are springboards and stands. All this is made in the US, certified, other equipment cannot be used, in fact, like the timing system in swimming. In this case, we can talk about a monopoly right,” explained earlier President of the Diving Federation Yefim Klimov.

These factors of international certification often come to the fore when there is a proposal to replace this or that imported equipment with domestic. Often, this can only be done in relation to amateur sports. Marat Bariyev, President of the Tatarstan Artistic Gymnastics Federation, recalled that before the 2022 national championship in Kazan, they were lucky to hold competitions on new sports equipment purchased in Germany for about 20 million rubles. This event is unique in three ways. Firstly, they managed to buy it at old prices, and the equipment is identical to that used in competitions at the Olympics and world championships. Similar equipment was purchased about ten years ago for the Universiade, and it still serves the Gymnastics Centre faithfully. Secondly, when the equipment was already being transported to Russia, sanctions were imposed on the country, making similar purchases impossible in the future.

Preparation for the national championship, a certain look ahead allowed then not to worry about the staffing of the same Gymnastics Centre before the BRICS Games. Thus, Tatarstan gymnastics was very lucky in that the leadership of its federation managed to prepare for the home national championship, a lot of work was put into it.

There are almost no ski jumps, but there is a champion

Meanwhile, there are sports where things are not so rosy. For example, ski jumping, when from what is necessary for the starts (ski jumps, skis, suits, helmets) only the snow where the jumpers land can be called domestic. Everything else is produced in countries that are extremely unfriendly to Russia. To some extent, Tatarstan is saved by the fact that the centres for training in this sport are located in other republics.

For example, Beijing vice-champion Danil Sadreyev won two victories at once in the beginning of the winter season in ski jumping competitions on 95— and 120-metre apparatuses (the second discipline is non-Olympic and has its own name “Flying on skis”). Plus, the athlete came in second in jumping from a 120-metre ski jump, and the competition itself was held in Tchaikovsky, Perm Region, one of the centres for the development of ski jumping. There is no such infrastructure in Tatarstan, with the exception of Tramplin ski complex in Derbyshki, Kazan, and the Centre for the Development of this sport in Leninogorsk, thanks to which two Olympians were trained — Nikolai Petrushin (Nagano 1998) and, in fact, Danil Sadreyev.

It is possible that Vladimir Leonov's proposal to hold the BRICS Winter Games in Kazan was prompted by the desire to update the material and technical base for Tatarstan athletes. In terms of competition, the question is not even worth it. The closest competitor of the Russians in winter disciplines from the BRICS countries is China, with which our country is already competing. It is enough to recall the Russian-Chinese Winter Youth Games that ended in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk on 14 January.

China, it would seem, took third place in the overall team at the home Olympics in Beijing, but this was a moment from the category of “walls help at home,” when foreign athletes were attracted to the Chinese national team for the first time in the history of sports development, and former American Guo Eileen won two gold medals. Otherwise China alone would not be able to create a competitive level at the BRICS Winter Games, but significantly updating the “landscape” of Tatarstan in winter disciplines is a completely feasible task.

The main difficulties in biathlon and shooting

The biathletes of the Russian national team raised another pressing problem with consumables — cartridges. This problem was known before. One of the shooting specialists said off the record that work is underway to complete the inventory, which is now very difficult to find, in particular, we are talking about cartridges. “We are scouring, looking, contacting partners who refer to the fact that there is a shortage of gunpowder now. Even with the presence of a gunpowder plant in Kazan. At the same time, the cost of a cartridge, which recently cost 18 rubles, has sharply increased. Now we can't even buy them for 43. And the upper limit of the cost is 48 rubles.

At the same time, there is a “federal standard” in sports, when the Ministry of Sports of the Russian Federation allocates its own funding for each individual discipline. The annual consumption of cartridges by a republican school is envisaged in the amount of 4-4.5 million cartridges. This is ideal, shooters are ready to agree even to figures of 3 million. But even in the years of maximum success of the students of the sports school, the available resources were enough to purchase about 1.1 million cartridges. And this is not bad, since this year the figure has decreased even more, which means that the training process is carried out in the amount of 20-30% of its capacity. At the same time, in other regions of Russia, the figures are even lower, with the exception of the Lipetsk region, where President of the shooting union of Russia Vladimir Lisin comes from — there is also extra-budgetary financing.

“Thanks to AO TAIF, we bought new, English wheelchairs for basketball players”

However, memories of the fact that we have lived through much worse times, for example in the 1990s, help not to fall into despair. There is an understanding that all resources should be spent on achieving the main goal.

At the board meeting of the Ministry of Sports of Tatarstan, the topics of sports and SVO intersected repeatedly: both in the final speech of First Deputy Prime Minister of the Republic of Tatarstan Leyla Fazleyeva and in the speech of a person “from the ground”, the head of the Centre for the Development of Adaptive Sports of the Republic of Tatarstan Timur Sadriyev. He said that 13 teams in various types of adaptive hockey were created at the centre for the organization of adaptive sports. Ten people who have undergone a special military operation play in these teams.

From 27 January to 4 February, Kazan will host the Russian Sledge Hockey Championship, to the matches of which Sadriyev invited. The competition will feature seven teams: the Moscow and Novosibirsk Region teams, Yaroslavl Loco-sledge (Yaroslavl Region), Ural Wolves (Sverdlovsk Region), SKA-Strela (Saint Petersburg), Tornado (Sverdlovsk Region), Ogni Magnitki (Chelyabinsk Region) and Tatsib — the Republic of Tatarstan team.

“I would like to mention my colleagues from Snow Leopard Wings wheelchair basketball team where several special military operation veterans also train. Such sports as knife throwing and target shooting are actively developing,” Sadriyev emphasised, thereby once again recalling the terrible shortage of cartridges for shooters.

According to him, not everyone has such reliable sponsors as newly-crowned national champions Snow Leopard Wings, who were provided with all the necessities, including a wheelchair fleet, even before the victorious season.

“In basketball, the wheelchair is different, not a household one. It is nimble, manoeuvrable, requiring habit,” recalled team veteran Igor Samartsev, who outlined past problems. “Our first wheelchairs were not adapted for basketball, more for dancing. The size was wrong and they were weak.”

“At first, we had wheelchairs from St Petersburg — they had thin material that broke quickly. Then we played in German second-hand wheelchairs, which have thick steel, they seem heavy, but if you speed up, you can't stop, and they are less manoeuvrable. And then, thanks to TAIF, we bought new, English ones: thinner tubes, manoeuvrable, but durable,” added another old-timer of the team, Dinar Kamaliyev.