An Olympic Challenge: Managing Talent in the Home Country for 2014

The Vancouver Olympics of 2010 are over and winter athletes are now looking forward to 2014 in Sochi, Russia.  Well, maybe all winter athletes except the Russians as their political leaders reportedly are grievously disappointed with their performances at the 2010 Games.  As reported by USA Today:

Coming into the Games, the Moscow daily Izvestia said authorities, in an internal memo, were projecting at least seven golds and as many as 31 medals in all. Almost midway through the competition, the speaker of Russia’s State Duma, its lower house of parliament, said anything less than a fourth-place finish in the medals race “would absolutely be a failure.”

Well, by those performance targets, the Russian Winter Olympic Team certainly failed to meet expectations with their final medal count being 3 golds, 15 overall medals, and 6th in the medal standings.  So, what’s a former Olympic “juggernaut” to do now?  As a Russian Olympics official said, “Russia team’s performance will be addressed to the proper authorities.” Now that just inspires warm fuzzy feelings of development planning and capability building, doesn’t it? How about this instead? How about some root cause analysis of declining Russian athletic performance over the past five Olympics?

If we take a good, long look at the drastic, dramatic change in organizational context that the Russian Olympic organization has experienced in the past 20-25 years, things get a bit interesting because . . . that Russian Olympic organization that won so many medals? Well, that was the Soviet Olympic organization.  Remember that country? 15 republics, now 15 independent countries.

And remember those coaches and athletes, hand-picked at young ages and shipped to sports camps to train for no other purpose than to win gold for the Motherland every four years?  Now, they’re dispersed across 15 countries, so the available athletic talent pipeline is dramatically reduced.  The Russian Olympics organization has a talent supply issue.

In addition, coaches and athletes who won gold for the USSR are now being paid quite handsomely to coach other countries’ athletes. The rewards are better in other, similar organizations, too.  And according to Russian Olympic officials, there is no intent to invest any more than the $30M annually being invested in Russia’s Olympic program.  Looks like we have a rewards issue as well.

So, how does the Russian Olympic team improve its performance for 2014, when the games are on home soil? With Putin and other leaders meeting in late March to weigh the results of the last 2½ weeks and discuss 2014, a few ideas from a talent management perspective:

• Elevate the competitor value proposition of the Sochi games (similar to an employment value proposition). A goal of the IOC and the Sochi Olympic Organizing Committee is revenue.  How does Russian athletic talent drive revenue?  Or is it less a question of specifically Russian athletic talent and more a question of global athletic talent?  IMHO, the Olympics have become more about star talent – regardless of where it comes from.  Therefore, one strategy is to make sure that the Sochi games attract the best global talent to compete. Which means competitive (and safe) courses, fair officiating, great athletic facilities, nice accommodations for athletes’ families for the duration of the games, and oh yeah, GREAT coverage, especially to large TV markets like the US.

• Maximize the return (e.g., medals) on a limited investment in talent. China was very clever for the Beijing Games; they invested in a few sports that had many events, and therefore many medals (for example, rowing).  They could train many athletes using the same equipment, facilities, etc., deploy the talent to the events for that sport, and bring in more medals. For the Russians, this may mean focusing less on the resource intensive individual medal events, like figure skating, and more on the high volume events, like the Nordic and speed skating events.

And that’s just a starting point. The bottom line? The Russian Olympics organization needs to think of itself as a business that must effectively manage the talent for the 2014 Games in order to realize its objectives.  Nope, this isn’t a political issue, it’s a talent management challenge.