Soviet and Post-Soviet Sport

Ideological challenges to developing leisure sport in Romania: a cultural and historical analysis of the impact of elite sport on popular sport practice

“…The push to earn more titles continued even after the change in political regime after 1989, with 24 medals won at the Olympic Games in Seoul 1988 and 26 at the Sydney Games in 2000. These exceptional results, despite the country's persistent social and economic problems seem counterintuitive; generally, one would expect that a weak economy would have had a negative impact on a nation's sporting success (Poupaux, 2006). The explanation seems to lie in the gap between the shutdown of talent identification and the drying up of the generation of athletes maturing between 1988 and 2000.…”