At the 2016 Rio Olympics, Ekaterina Makarova became part of the first Russian doubles team in history to win an Olympic gold medal in tennis. The achievement was a milestone in her career, but it was even more significant for her country.
Makarova travelled to Rio with controversy surrounding the entire Russian Olympic team. Their track and field team was banned from the games after an independent investigation found them guilty of committing widespread doping violations. Furthermore, another report uncovered deliberate tampering with testing samples of Russian athletes during the 2014 Sochi winter games.
Luckily for Makarova, Russian tennis hasn’t been implicated in any of those shocking scandals. Pairing up with Elena Vesnina in Rio, the team defeated Switzerland’s Martina Hingis and Timea Bacsinszky to clinch the gold medal. The triumph raked in a substantial reward back in her home country. President Vladimir Putin awarded every gold medal winner a BMW X6, a German-made luxury four-wheel drive.
“In Russia, it’s a very big thing. We get a lot of money and we get a lot of other stuff. We get the car from the President and not many other countries will give these sort of gifts,” Makarova said after her Tuesday win in Dubai.
“Well, I didn’t know that I would win. And when you are Olympic champion, you can be in your country and go wherever you want to go, and they will let you go, because it’s a very big status in Russia,” she added.
Despite numerous pieces evidence identifying Russia’s violation of anti-doping procedures over a long period of time, world No.37 swiftly jumped to the defence of her country. Makarova suggested that Russia has fallen victim to political attack as she described her compatriots as ‘the strongest people in the world.’
“I think it’s not the Russian sports. It’s just the Russian politics with the world that everyone is against us. Maybe we do some not very good things, but still, I think the sportsmen is not the people who need to do like the doping and not go to the Olympic Games.” She said.
“But as Russians we are fighting, and I think we are just the strongest people in the world because we just need to survive in our country, and sometimes it’s a lot of things like that. So we are so hard inside,” Makarova explained.
The World anti-doping agency is currently in the process of the biological passports of Russian athletes. 12 athletes had had their results disqualified from the 2012 Olympics for doping, including gold medal winners Yuliya Zaripova and Sergey Kirdyapkin.
