Dubai: The current situation with Russian sport and a brand-new BMW car was just the motivation needed for Ekaterina Makarova in trying to set the order right for her country on the international stage.
In recent times, Russian athletes have been struggling to come to terms with the majority of their sportspersons ruled out due to the various doping scandals that broke in the middle of last year.
The tennis players were among the select few who were allowed to participate at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games last summer. And the Russian pairing of Makarova and Elena Vesnina did not disappoint as they teamed up to claim the doubles gold medal with a 6-4, 6-4 win against Martina Hingis and Timea Bacsinszky.
“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. 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 gold medal was a huge statement on behalf of Russian tennis and the medallists were gifted with German-made BMWs — a BMW X6 for a gold medal, BMW X5 for silver and BMW X4 for bronze.
“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,” she related.
“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.
Secondly, and more importantly, the medal was important to motivate the younger generation. “Yeah, it’s a big honour to be an Olympic champion, more because of the kids as they draw so much inspiration from watching the Olympics Games. I always wanted to win an Olympic gold medal even more than a Grand Slam perhaps,” she admitted.
