Russia targets top place in Sochi Games

Ice hockey and skiing-mad Russia on Wednesday set its sights on a top of the podium finish at its home Winter Olympic Games in 2014 after suffering the humiliation of an 11th place finish two years ago. Russia's skaters and other winter sport superstars came home from Vancouver to resounding jeers after claiming just three gold medals in their worst performance ever while seeing bitter rival and host nation Canada grab 14. The team's devastating failure sent shockwaves through the Russian sports system because it came just as the final preparations were getting underway for Games that President Vladimir Putin secured against long odds for Sochi. The head of Russia's Olympic Committee said the task of finishing first in the Black Sea resort -- a place popular with summer tourists for its rare Russian palm trees -- was "unbelievably" difficult but still manageable. "We have a target -- to win first place as a team," Alexander Zhukov told reporters. "This will be fairly hard to do. In fact, unbelievably so," the government veteran and close Putin ally conceded. "But we have pretty good potential." Russia's spirits have been lifted by a performance at this year's London Olympics that saw the team claim the fourth-best haul of gold medals and finish third in terms of the number of overall podium appearances. Putin -- a judo black belt who is learning ice hockey in time for Sochi and has built his political career around an action-man image that achieves results -- said Russia should be proud of its latest Summer Games performance. "We received 10 more medals than in 2008," he told the winning Olympians at a special Kremlin awards ceremony. "This is an unconditional success." The fear of Russia being humiliated in winter sports on home snow and ice has prompted coaches to effectively dump the old squad and focus on urgent youth training. Preparations are also being made for competitive finishes in what Zhukov called "non-traditional" sports, such as snowboarding. Zhukov said Russia's youngsters have been performing much better than their senior counterparts at recent competitions. But he conceded that not all of them will be able to "blend in" to the national squad. "We had some serious failures in the way we were preparing our athletes," Zhukov admitted. "But a new generation is growing up now."mos