SOCHI - The Winter Olympics drew to a close on Sunday with host nation Russia on top of the medals table and Canada winning the men's ice hockey final, but news that two more athletes tested positive for banned substances dimmed the golden glow. Canada claimed the last, most coveted title of the Games by sweeping aside Sweden 3-0 to retain their men's hockey crown, but two more victories for Russia gave them an unassailable lead with 13 golds to Norway's 11.
Sweden's misery was compounded by news that forward Nicklas Backstrom had failed a doping test. He missed the gold medal game against Canada, forcing his team to hastily rearrange the lineup shortly before the teams took to the ice. At the Sanki Sliding Centre, Alexander Zubkov added the four-man bobsleigh crown to his two-man title, while on the cross-country skiing track, Alexander Legkov grabbed the 50 km race in a Russian medals sweep.
That win ensured Russia was the most successful nation at the Games, emulating the Canadians who topped the rankings on home turf four years earlier. "People kept asking me whether I believed Russia could do as well as Canada did in Vancouver ... and I didn't believe it," 30-year-old Legkov told a news conference. "Now this is our pride, it's wonderful. What could be better than ending the Olympics with a gold medal and helping Russia top the medal table?"
Underlining the sense of national pride, a packed Fisht Stadium erupted in cheers as the Russian team marched past in the athletes' parade during the closing ceremony. Organisers will be delighted that athletic achievement has gone hand-in-hand with a generally well-run Games, so far untouched by violence at the hands of Islamist militants opposed to President Vladimir Putin and his pet project. Voices of dissent over Russia's human rights record, particularly regarding legislation that critics say discriminates against gays, have occasionally crashed the party, but attention has largely focused on sport.
RUSSIA PROVES CRITICS WRONG: BACH
International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach said the Russian hosts had proved their critics wrong. "We saw excellent Games and what counts most is the opinions of the athletes and they were enormously satisfied," he said. The Games had more than 2,800 athletes from 88 countries - both records - and featured 12 new events to attract younger fans and more broadcasters than ever before.
However, the Games have also seen six doping cases, five more than at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. Early on Sunday Austrian cross-country skier Johannes Duerr, who placed eighth in the skiathlon, tested positive for performance-boosting EPO and was excluded from the Games, according to the Austrian Olympic Committee.
"There's nothing left for me than to apologize to everyone. To my family, my wife," Duerr told Austrian TV ORF at the airport as he was leaving. Bach said the number of cases proved that the system of testing athletes was working. "The number of cases for me is not really relevant. What is important is that we see that the system works," he said. Bach spoke hours before the closing ceremony at the Fisht Stadium, one of several gleaming arenas built in Sochi that helped push the price tag for Russia's first Winter Games to an estimated $51 billion, a record for any Olympics.
Only time will tell if the project, on which Putin has staked much of his prestige, was worth it, as Russia faces the formidable challenge of turning Sochi and the surrounding areas into a year-round sports and entertainment hub. Bach said Sochi had undergone an "amazing transformation" from somewhere that looked more like a "Stalinist-style sanatorium city" in the mid-1990s to an Olympic host city with state-of-the-art venues. "It was terrible then. Seeing it 20 years after this transformation is amazing."
RUSSIAN PRIDE: For now Russian officials are basking in the glory of an event they believe has helped them build bridges with the West, with which Moscow has had uneasy relations under Putin. "The friendly faces, the warm Sochi sun and the glare of the Olympic gold have broken the ice of skepticism towards the new Russia," Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak, also Putin's Olympics organizer, said at the weekend.
The medals tally was an unexpected bonus after Russia mustered just three golds in Vancouver four years ago to place 11th in the rankings. The only regret for Russian fans was that the men's team progressed no further than the quarter-finals. Victory gave Canada a sweep of the ice hockey gold medals for a second consecutive Olympics. The women stormed back from 2-0 down in the last four minutes against the United States to break American hearts on Thursday.
The world's gaze turned to the final act of the February 7-23 Games, the closing ceremony, which Organizers said was designed to show a softer side of Russia after the muscular, assertive opening spectacle at the same venue. As if to prove their point, the show's producers deliberately replicated the embarrassing technical hitch from the opening show when one of five Olympic rings failed to open.
CLOSING CEREMONY PAINTS HOSTS IN SOFTER COLOURS: Sunday's closing ceremony at Russia's first Winter Olympics aimed to paint the host nation in softer colours than the muscular spectacle that kicked off the Games, organisers said. The show at the gleaming Fisht Stadium on the Black Sea coast took viewers on a poetic journey through Russia's rich heritage of visual arts, music, literature and dance.
And while the February 7 opening ceremony was all about asserting Russia's place in the world and underlining how it had finally shaken off the fetters of its Soviet past, one of the buzz words for the end-of-Games farewell was "nostalgia". "They are two very complementary shows," said Marco Balich, artistic executive producer of the ceremony. "As grand as the opening was, with this one they went for another side of Russia - intimate, full of heart, and they (Russian organisers) mentioned the word 'nostalgia'," he told Reuters.
Like the opening ceremony, the close once again celebrated great Russian painters, writers, musicians and dancers. Dissident author Alexander Solzhenitsyn remembered alongside Alexander Pushkin and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, while painters including Kazimir Malevich and March Chagall inspired the backdrop to the final chapter of the Games. Both Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet and the rival Mariinsky troupe from St. Petersburg represented, while a grandiose mass piano concert rang out to the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff.
In a glitzy closing ceremony, aimed at conveying a confident state at ease with its past as well as present, International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Thomas Bach said "Russia delivered all what it had promised". "What took decades in other parts of the world was achieved here in just seven years," he said.
"I would like to thank the President of the Russian Federation, Mr. Vladimir Putin, for his personal commitment to the extraordinary success of these Olympic Winter Games." Bach then closed the Black Sea coast showpiece in the traditional manner of looking ahead ot the next Games in South Korea in 2018. "I declare the 22nd Olympic Winter Games closed. In accordance with tradition, I call upon the youth of the world to assemble four years from now in PyeongChang to celebrate with us the 23rd Olympic Winter Games."