Soviet Disunion

Yurik Sarkisyan, a 31-year-old weightlifter, was a tiny cog in the sports machine that was the Soviet Union. An Armenian by birth, Sarkisyan won a silver medal in the boycott-marred 1980 Olympics in Moscow. With success came privileges: housing, the opportunity to travel, an above-average monthly stipend of rubles, hard-currency bonuses based on performance. And with privileges came respect.

But things changed for Sarkisyan, as they have for the athletes who will compete in Barcelona as the Unified Team—a fragile alliance of the 11 republics in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and Georgia. Since the breakup of the U.S.S.R., sports have taken a backseat to the more pressing concerns of a society whose newfound freedoms have been accompanied by hyperinflation and a drop in the already low standard of living. Sarkisyan continued to train in the same facility he always did, an hour outside Moscow, but he hasn't been paid his monthly salary of 1,000 rubles—about $8 on the open market—in a year. Costs, meanwhile, soared as the government eliminated most price controls in an effort to establish a market economy. "Our salary goes up two times," said Sarkisyan. "Inflation goes up 100 times."

Armenia, Sarkisyan's homeland, is at war with its neighboring republic, Azerbaijan, and his hometown of Samakert has been without electricity or gas for nine months. So Sarkisyan took his wife and twin daughters to the weightlifting center to live. The four Sarkisyans shared two small rooms in the athletes' dormitory, and for this he had to pay 1,500 rubles a month—the equivalent of a month and a half's salary. "I can't go home to train, because there's a war, no food," Sarkisyan said. "Second place at the world championships in Dowschengen, Germany, last year was worth $750, and it is precisely on that money we're living now. We can live here for another two or three months, and then we don't know. I don't even know what my citizenship is."

Sarkisyan had hoped, probably unrealistically, that success in Barcelona would open doors for him in other countries. He dreamed of competing in 1996 for Australia, or even the U.S. The Unified Team, to the average Soviet athlete, was little more than a forced marriage engineered by IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch to alleviate a housing shortage in the Olympic Village. The agreement reached in March by the CIS members and Georgia to compete in Barcelona as a unified team did, however, preserve a measure of continuity in the sports system. The republics have agreed to compete as a single team one last time. Four years from now, when the Olympics are held in Atlanta, each republic will send its own team to the Games, as the Baltic republics, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, are doing now.

Sarkisyan's dreams of emigration fueled his training. Every squat. Every lift. Every time he saw the faces of his wife and children. But it is difficult to train on a diet of dreams and worry, and in the CIS weightlifting championships, Sarkisyan finished third. Only the first, and possibly the second, qualifier in his weight class would be going to Barcelona. Barring injury to one of the weightlifters, Sarkisyan was staying home. Wherever home was.

The deteriorating economic climate in Russia and its neighboring republics has adversely affected the training of virtually all Unified Team athletes. "We're not going to be able to compete with the U.S. and Germany, probably not in the 1994 Goodwill Games and definitely not in 1996," says Nikolai Rusak, chairman of the Interregional Sports Committee.

The swimmers have been particularly hard hit. Civil war in Georgia, which has a tropical climate, and the conflict in Armenia, where the swimmers train at altitude, have deprived the team of its prime winter training facilities. And soaring food prices have led to a vitamin deficiency in the swimmers' diet, according to head coach Gleb Petrov. "Since September our swimmers have not even been getting elementary doses of the ABC group of vitamins," Petrov said. "Our budget went up a little, but prices rose six to eight times. And with the hike in airline prices, we couldn't compete in international competitions."

No sport has been spared. Cyclists, rowers, kayakers, track and field athletes—more than 500 team members in all who generally train in Georgia were unable to do so last winter. The quality of the food is universally decried. Salaries are paid late or not at all. Further, the criteria for selecting the Unified Team have been politicized. Careful consideration of each athlete's republic of origin is being factored into his or her placement on the team. "Each republic wants to be assured it has representatives on the national team," says Aleksandr Aleksandrov, the women's gymnastics coach. "I can tell it's not going to be entirely objective."

"In sports like judo, wrestling, boxing and weightlifting, a committee decides the team," says Rusak. "They'll pick one representative from each republic instead of maybe taking seven representatives from Russia, even if they are the best seven."

The mixing of politics and sport is, naturally, demoralizing, not only for the athletes but also for the coaches. There has already been a dramatic exodus of coaches from the former U.S.S.R. who feel betrayed as they watch the system that spawned the greatest sports power in the history of the Olympics being dismantled. Tamara Alexeyeva, Olga Korbut's former gymnastics coach, is now working in South Africa. After the Olympics, the coach of the Unified Team men's gymnastics team, Leonid Arkaev, will be gone. "I will leave because one has to earn some money to live," Arkaev says.