Saturday, August 9, 2008

Olympic "Truce" Fails to Prevent Russian-Georgian War

From the UK Guardian:

As news of the conflict reached the two teams Russia's team leader described the Georgian president as "mentally ill" and the IOC was pressed to defend the Olympic truce, broken so spectacularly just as the opening ceremony of the Beijing games took place last night.

Russia and Georgia will meet in competition in the women's beach volleyball on Wednesday, but the IOC said that it had no plans to introduce special security measures for the game.

Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin attended the opening ceremony in Beijing and met with IOC president Jacques Rogge, but IOC spokeswoman Giselle Davies said the conflict was not discussed.

"The meeting was very much focused on the sporting agenda, they discussed Sochi [the Russian city hosting the 2014 winter Olympics]. There was no discussion of any political or global incidents," she said.

"The sad reality is that out of the nations who were parading last night a number of them are in conflict and in an ideal world it's not something we would like to see. We can only bring the ideals of how sport can bring people together as friends."

Russian Olympic Committee spokesman Gennady Shvets said that the team had been upset by reports of up to 1,500 deaths, and were following developments closely. He insisted that preparation would not be interrupted, but attacked the Georgian president.

"Our athletes are doing what they've prepared for years. There's no politics." Describing Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili, who is backed by Washington, he said: "He's stupid, a criminal, mentally ill, he should go to a clinic. Normally during the Olympics countries try to calm down any conflicts they have."

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