Russians Lodge New Skating Protest

The biggest crisis in Olympic politics for 18 years continued to escalate last night when the Kremlin urged Russia's athletes to boycott the games' closing ceremony tomorrow and team officials filed another protest against a decision in the figure skating.

The appeal against the judging in Thursday's women's figure skating, won by the 16-year-old Sarah Hughes of the United States, and the demand for a gold medal for the second-placed Irina Slutskaya added to the tension surrounding the games, which the Russian government has condemned as a "disgraceful winter carnival of commerce, bias and scandal that besmirched the Olympic ideal".

Incensed at a series of controversial judging decisions against Russian athletes in Salt Lake City that started with the duplicate gold awarded to Canada in the pairs figure skating, the Kremlin, the government, the parliament and sports officials all complained of an anti-Russian "witchhunt".

The lower house of parliament debated furiously all day and veered towards calling for the Russian contingent to come home early. The foreign ministry protested. And the Russian team's sponsors, Russian Aluminium, said it was hiring top international lawyers with a view to legal action in defence of Russia's athletes.

"The sheer number of biased judging cases leads to the inevitable conclusion that the Olympic organisers are engaged in real warfare against our athletes," the company said in a statement.

But while the Russian Olympic Committee threatened to leave Salt Lake City, the Kremlin last night wanted them to stay but to boycott the closing ceremony. "The Russian delegation definitely should not participate in the closing ceremonies," said the Kremlin spokesman, Sergei Yastrzhembsky. "The IOC bureaucrats have already spoiled the festivity for us by repeatedly displaying disrespect to our athletes."

Yastrzhembsky said, however, that he was speaking privately as "a sports fan", leaving it unclear whether the boycott would take place. The cold war rhetoric and the strongest invective to come out of Moscow since the crisis surrounding the 1984 summer games in Los Angeles, which the Soviet Union boycotted, set the scene last night for a tense ice hockey semi-final pitting the angry Russians against their US hosts.

It was the decision by the local organisers to have the winning US ice hockey team from the 1980 Olympics to light the flame at the opening ceremony two weeks ago which first upset Russian government officials. Their victory by a team of college students over the Soviet Union in the semi-final was dubbed "Miracle on Ice" at a time when relations between the two countries were near their worst.

"Everything we are seeing in Salt Lake City, we can call the Wild Olympics in the Wild West," said a Russian government spokesman, Alexei Volin. "Everything that is happening in Salt Lake City discredits the Olympic movement and its sporting spirit."

Such sentiment was echoed in an unusual and prompt intervention by the Russian president Vladimir Putin, who sharply criticised the IOC and said the games were a flop. He also attacked the rampant commerce surrounding the games. "The process of commercialising the Olympic movement to the extreme has come into conflict with Olympic principles," he said.

Earlier Russian Olympic officials had given the International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge 24 hours to resolve problems raised by "non-objective" decisions by judges and officials in figure skating, ice hockey and cross-country skiing. Rogge wrote to Putin promising that he had personally investigated the matters under complaint and believed everything was in order. But it was clear by the Russians decision to protest over the women's figure skating that the letter had failed to resolve the issue.

"We don't want to take the gold medal away from the American skater but our skater deserved a gold medal," a spokesman said. Most neutral observers, however, believe that Hughes deserved to win.

The Russian team has filed a number of protests since the IOC and the International Skating Union took the unprecedented step of awarding a second gold medal in the figure-skating pairs competition to the Canadians Jamie Salé and David Pelletier. The decision followed a four-day North American media campaign to overturn the original result in which the Russian pair Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze took gold.

But Russia is not alone. Indeed, the South Koreans are furious with the decision to disqualify Kim Dong-sung after he crossed the line first in Thursday's 1500m final of the short-track speed skating but was disqualified for impeding the line of Apolo Anton Ohno of the US. They are now taking the unprecedented step of filing a civil lawsuit against the referee David Hewish.

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