BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

13/03/2010

Belarus strongman threatens to ban national side

President Alexander Lukashenko on Friday issued an unusual public dressing-down to the Belarus ice hockey side, threatening to ban them from the world championships if they repeated their poor Olympic showing.

President Alexander Lukashenko, seen here in 2009, on Friday issued an unusual public dressing-down to the Belarus ice hockey side, threatening to ban them from the world championships if they repeated their poor Olympic showing.

"Their performance in the Olympics arouses in me not only concern but also dissatisfaction," said the Belarus strongman, a sports fan who has ruled the country since 1994 and is regularly pictured taking to the ice.

The maverick leader said that if the team was going to play badly in the World Championships in Germany in May "then it would be better not to go there and stay at home," a statement from his press service quoted him as saying.

"Why waste the money and upset the people?" he said at the meeting devoted to the development of ice hockey in Belarus.

The Belarus ice hockey team was eliminated in the preliminary rounds of the Vancouver Winter Olympics, a major disappointment for the young ex-Soviet country where the sport is a national obsession.

Lukashenko noted that ice hockey is "the president's favourite sport".

Russia's leaders have expressed disappointment with the performance of the Russian team in the Olympics but the comments by the Belarussian president went considerably further.

Recalling that Belarus had been hit by the global economic crisis, Lukashenko said that it was "inadmissible to waste money for nothing.

"You will not be able to count on more funding without an effective return," he said.

Lukashenko also turned his ire on the country's underperforming top hockey club Dinamo Minsk, which plays in the Russia-based Continental Hockey League.

"If we are going to play next year as badly as this year then it would be better to spend the money inside the country rather than on travelling across the former Soviet Union from Vladivostok to Brest," he scoffed.

"Their performance is unbearable and intolerable," he said.

Source:

http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/sports/171292/belarus-strongman-threatens-to-ban-national-side


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