Speech at Ceremony Presenting State Decorations to Medal Winners at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.Part 1
March 15, 2010
The Kremlin, Moscow
Беседа с чемпионами и призёрами XXI зимних Олимпийских игр 2010 года в Ванкувере
15 марта 2010 года Москва, Кремль
PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA DMITRY MEDVEDEV: Dear friends,
I wish you a warm welcome and congratulate you on your Olympic medals. It is a great pleasure to see you. Our teams overall results were modest and did not live up to the hopes we placed in these Olympics, but nevertheless, all of you present today put on excellent performances and your achievements are indisputable. Once again, I congratulate you on these achievements.
Of course, the purpose of todays meeting is for me to present to you these state decorations, but this is not all. I would like to discuss with you, as our best athletes, what we can do to prepare for the Sochi Olympics, after all, who better to discuss this subject with than you?
Of course, top-level sport is always a huge amount of hard work plus a little bit of luck. But clearly, without concrete and systematic effort, and without unflagging will to achieve results, you would not have succeeded in doing what you did, and you displayed precisely this kind of will in Vancouver.
I want to address a separate thanks to your coaches. They are always there not only to help the athletes develop their physical capabilities but also maintain them in good mental shape too it is essential for the athletes after all to be able to keep a balanced state and withstand the intense psychological pressure they come under. The Olympics, of course, represent the peak of this kind of pressure, and so the coaches also made a very important contribution to your victories.
It is no secret for anyone that sport in our country is going through a change in generations today. In one sense, you could say that a change of generations is always taking place, of course, only sometimes it happens quicker, and sometimes it is a slower process. But whatever the case, many of our young athletes have shown that our Olympic team does have good potential, that our young sportspeople do have talent.
I will cite the names of some of those present, but do not get upset if do not cite everyones names. My words are addressed to all of you, but I nevertheless want to note the memorable performance that we saw from young Olympic medal winner, cross-country skier Alexander Panzhinsky. As far as I know, tomorrow is Alexanders birthday. He will be turning 21, and we hope that tomorrow will find him in the best of spirits. We will put him in a good mood today and tomorrow can add to it. Congratulations! Strictly speaking, it is not in Russian tradition to wish a happy birthday ahead of the actual date, but you could say that today, we are celebrating not your birthday, but your performance.
It is very important to see that our athletes are also competitive in what are relatively new sports for our country. We got confirmation of this when Yekaterina Ilyukhina won our countrys first ever silver medal in snowboarding, and when Alexander Tretyakov won bronze in skeleton. Of course, the gold medals won by skier Nikita Kryukov, and by Yevgeny Ustyugov in biathlon were a real delight for our fans and once again confirmed the Russian schools strong standing in these sports, in which we do have very solid traditions. It is an excellent synthesis when we win medals in sports in which we have never achieved high results in the past, and also win medals in the sports in which we have always been strong.
The example set by the renowned masters in the team also played a big part in these victories. We saw this in the stubborn determination that Anna Bogaliy-Titovets, Olga Zaitseva, Olga Medvedtseva and Svetlana Sleptsova displayed in the biathlon, for example. In Vancouver you repeated the triumph the Russian team enjoyed in Turin, and this was really excellent to see. Of course, I also want to note the tremendous strength of will and determination shown by Yevgeny Plushchenko, who returned to the ice after a long break and put on a virtuoso performance, taking the silver medal. We all couldnt help but feel upset, of course, but that subject has already been thoroughly discussed.
I congratulate too and note the success of everyone whose names I did not cite, and I want to say that you all did extremely well.
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