The Putin Revival; Russia's top sports fan inspires powerful patrons to adopt the Olympic team.(Cover Story)

Byline: Frank Brown (With Nadezhda Titova and Anna Arutiunova)

Like so much else in Russia these days, the development of the Athens Olympic team reflects the very personal tastes of President Vladimir Putin. When the former KGB chief and martial artist came to power in 2000, replacing the ruddy-nosed Boris Yeltsin, it suddenly became cool to be athletic.

Then the official money started to flow, most visibly through the Presidential Fund, started in 2002, that rewards 3,000 top athletes and coaches with $500 a month. While Yeltsin lavished money mainly on one sport, tennis, Putin has ignited a much wider revival. And where Putin leads, others follow. Soviet-era state sports schools are being revived by a typically murky new Russian network of government officials and business tycoons. A former KGB colleague of Putin's, Nikolai Patrushev, now heads both the new Russian security agency and the volleyball federation. Media tycoon Vladimir Potanin is underwriting the badminton federation. Billionaire metals magnate Vladimir Lisin became president of the riflery federation in 2002. The world's largest natural-gas firm, Gazprom, began funding this year in fencing. The minister of Agriculture is the president of the judo team, led by Tamerlan Tmenov in the 100-kilo class. The team's members recently started eating better after a Moscow meat-processing factory gave them a gift of 600 kilos of cold cuts, says federation ...