Speculation that Bulgaria quite shortsightedly had lost a great opportunity of winning a gold medal at the Vancouver Olympics has only added to the bitter taste of Bulgaria’s abject failure at the Games.

It was not enough that all of Bulgaria’s hopes for a respectable performance at the games have been crushed by bad luck, bad decisions, poor preparation and lack of funds, but now media reports suggest that Bulgaria’s skiing federation had turned down a request by Russian Anastasia Kuzmina to represent the country at the Games.

The disappointment in this case is all the worse because Kuzmina surprisingly won the gold medal in the women’s biathlon 7.5km sprint on February 13, competing for Slovakia. She also won the silver medal in the 10km pursuit.  

On February 24, Boran Hadjiev, the former head coach of Bulgaria’s national biathlon team told Bulagrian news agency BTA that mere months before the Olympics, Kuzmina had virtually begged Bulgaria to allow her to join its team. The reason was that her being fourth in the pecking order for the strong Russian team – winner of the women’s relay race in Vancouver – Kuzmina saw little potential to develop her career, Hadjiev said.

"In the summer of 2009, both Kuzmina and her husband were training in Bulgaria at the Belmeken sports facility," Hadjiev told BTA. "It was then that Kuzmina asked me to do everything possible to help her with the procedure of getting a Bulgarian passport so that she could compete for Bulgaria. I talked about it with our federation, but eventually they turned her offer down," Hadjiev said.

Later, Kuzmina asked once again to be allowed to compete for Bulgaria, but was once again rejected. Hadjiev said that he had a text message from Kuzmina to back his his words.

"I can only regret now, because with Kuzmina on board we could have had a strong team, something which we will not see happening in the next few years," Hadjiev said.
Turned down by Bulgaria, Kuzmina went on to compete for Slovakia, as she had already acquired Slovakian citizenship in 2007. Bulgaria’s best finish in the 7.5km sprint came from Nina Klenovska, who was 62nd.

Kuzmina’s gold medal is the first won by a Slovak at Winter Olympics since the break-up of Czechoslovakia in 1993. Her two medals, together with the bronze won by Pavol Hurajt in the men’s 15km mass start put Slovakia in the prestigious 15th position in the country medals ranking.

So far, no one from Bulgaria ski fedration has reacted to Hadjiev’s claims, which can only add to Bulgarians’ frustration that something went wrong somewhere in the way Bulgaria prepared its athletes for the Games, since by February 24 none of them had come even close to ending on the podium in Vancouver.