Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is not a happy man, especially after the performance in the just completed XXI Winter Olympics in Vancouver.
On Monday, Medvedev called for the resignations of every official in charge of preparing Russian athletes for the Winter Olympics.
The Russians have become accustomed to success at the winter games, using the Olympics as a source to boost national pride.
But Russia only managed a total of 15 medals in Vancouver and finished 11th overall with just three Gold medals, their worst performance ever at the Winter Olympics.
Medvedev wants immediate improvement across the board in advance of the 2014 Winter Olympics which are to be held in Sochi.
Perhaps the most glaring failure of the Vancouver games was the figure skating competition, where Russia failed to win a Gold medal for the first time in 50 years.
Triple Olympic champion Irina Rodnina launched a scathing attack on the head of the Russian figure skating federation, Valentin Piseyev, blaming him for his team’s dismal performance.
“Serious people in the figure skating world do not want to deal with him. They have no respect for him,” said Rodnina, who won all of the competitions where she performed during her career.
But most inside the Russian Federation know the real reasons behind their failures in Vancouver.
The fall of the Soviet Union created a vastly underfunded national sports program that saw many of Russia’s top coaches flee the country over the past 20 years. 
“We need to start from the very beginning,” said Russian swimming legend Alexander Popov, who won four Olympic gold medals.
“The Soviet system of ruling the sports was destroyed after the fall of the Soviet Union. Now we need to create the new one.”
He added: “Once, we suffered from lack of funding but now we have even more money than we need. Now is the time to learn how to use funding effectively, develop sports infrastructure, to manage sports in a proper way. We all have lost too much of our national pride in the post-Soviet years.”
Russian Olympic Committee deputy president Vladimir Vasin echoed Popov’s thoughts, noting the severe financial crisis that drove many of Russia’s sports specialists to work abroad.
“I heard Russian spoken from people dressed in many other countries’ uniforms in the Olympic village,” said Vasin, himself a former Olympic champion.
With funds now flowing back into Russian sports, the country has a race against the clock to sort out the problems of its sports management before the 2014 Winter Olympics.
One of the few bright spots for Russia in Vancouver was the performance of the biathlon team, who won two of their three Gold medals at the under a more modern system of management.
They were helped by funds from the Russian Biathlon Union president Mikhail Prokhorov, one of the Russia’s richest men, and the administrative experience of the federation executive chief Sergei Kushchenko who worked for the CSKA Moscow basketball league.
