While this incident does not play a pivotal role in my work as a Kremlin “agent,” the effort I personally made for Nodar’s family, and for justice, it did set the stage. Ultimately, we uncovered many inconsistencies in the Olympic Committee’s treatment of this accident, and our research led to companies from Germany and elsewhere that were riding the fringes of good business practices. Key people at the Olympics and NOC decision makers were not exactly above board in handing Nodar’s death or in the way Vancouver went off. At those Olympics in Vancouver the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the International Luge Federation (FIL), and almost every official entity involved in the Nodar incident had failed athletes and the public miserably.
As far as I can remember, the outrage and reporting on this incident were the last time there was any consensus on truth from mainstream media in the West, at least as far as the Olympics are concerned. And while I did not fully realize it at the time, the disgraceful way Nodar and his family were treated, it had awakened the activist within me.
February 2014 was the year Phil Butler “sleeper agent” was switched on by those pesky Russians. Or at least this is how some will eventually portray me. In all honesty, I have wondered many times why RTTV called to asked me to go on live television the same day Vladimir Putin opened the Sochi Olympics. However, in doing my research for the book you are reading, the reason became crystal clear. I am sure I first got on Russian media’s radar with a story I wrote about Sochi 2014 for the Epoch Times entitled “What If Sochi Will Be Greater Than Great? A Prelude of Hope to the XXII Winter Olympiad.”
The day before Margarita Simonyan’s team contacted me for an interview, I had posted another article about those upcoming Sochi Olympics. The piece covered the diatribe that the Western mainstream media was launching against the Russians. Once again, our influence with Everything PR News parlayed the dissenting view. The power of this small media voice showed the negative PR campaigns, and cast Putin and Russia in a clear and more positive light. The story, “Time, Richard Stengel, and Time for Better Russia Messaging” involved TIME magazine’s former editor Richard Stengel, and his wielding of the blunt tool of propaganda for President Barack Obama as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. In short, I had exposed Stengel and TIME as being part of the greater anti-Russia media cabal. I distinctly remember quoting Vladimir Putin on western claims he was homophobic and that gay athletes at Sochi would be in danger:
“Just leave the children alone, please.”
The 2014 Sochi Olympics were a brilliant spectacle put on by the Russian people, and most saw though an unprecedented negative media campaign was leveled against the sporting event. After my RT interview, I joined the world in witnessing the nastiest and most scandalous propaganda assault ever undertaken. A shining moment for hundreds of wonderful athletes was transformed into a media circus — a circus with very powerful ringmasters in charge.
I watched from Germany on BBC, and Olympic spectacle that was at once thrilling and magnificent, and at the same time the saddest moment in my life as an athlete. The BBC and most other Western media reported on stray dogs, non-functional toilets, the plight of gays in Sochi bars, and left out or convoluted anything positive about the scene in Sochi.
For my team and me this was onerous, given we had colleagues on the ground in Sochi who were covering events. The spectacle that was a great Olympics left us feeling as if we witnessed a murder on closed circuit TV and the trial judge excluded our testimony. In the end, the “murderers” of the Sochi Olympics went free.
American President Barack Obama led the empire’s unsportsmanlike conduct toward the Olympics in 2014. He was joined by the entire LGBT community of the western world. They even pulled lesbian tennis legend Billy Jean King out of mothballs just to become the poster girl of anti-Russian sports. In the end, the world’s journalists missed no opportunity to cast a shadow over Russia’s effort.
Reporters were instructed to dig for dirt and dig they did. Anytime a US athlete took a spill on the slopes, a news team was there to talk about bad snow conditions. If a Russian won a medal and an American did not, the whining and crying and bitching and moaning did not stop. From a sportsman’s perspective watching Sochi was like watching athletics and the Olympic dream being flushed down a toilet. The horrendous coverage by American networks was only exceeded in nastiness by the BBC.
One moment that showed the British network’s biased coverage came when Jenny Jones won Great Britain’s first Olympic medal on snow in the snowboarding competition. In the booth for BBC were British snowboarder Aimee Fuller joined by Ed Leigh and Tim Warwood. The announcers were heard by viewers cheering when Jones’s competitors fell. Fans of the sport complained to BBC about the lack of sportsmanship, which led to the article on the subject.
This was not an isolated event, I assure you. Oliver Brown of The Telegraph captured the distasteful essence of the BBC’s unsportsmanlike partisanship:
“In particular, the squeals from Fuller’s gormless sidekicks, Ed Leigh and Tim Warwood, both imploring Jones’s Austrian rival Anna Gasser to fall over, were quite hog-whimperingly awful. It was the point at which patriotic zealousness tipped over into zealotry.”
Russians whom I know were good sports, my young colleagues, photographers Pasha Kovalenko and Nina Zotina, took it upon themselves to go overboard photographing Olympic events for us. In all honesty, it was these two young Russians who opened my eyes to just how tragic the media war on Russia was. You see, we could not afford to pay much for photographers or reporters at the games, but these two young professionals were ever trusting and professional, and they ended up donating much of their time and effort to our cause of showing Sochi realistically. These two, and a scattering of other colleagues and associates of theirs, all proved the real spirit of Russians in a test which they never knew was a test.
Looking back, I wonder how any of us could have known that the Sochi Olympics smear campaign was just a diversion for the big show, for the Ukraine civil war to come. In this regard I shall never forget Pasha messaging me one day to ask, “Phil, do you think there will be war in Ukraine? I am afraid because I have family there.” Like most people living in the west of Europe, I had no idea a new revolution was getting underway in Kiev.
It wasn’t long before we all learned to be scared. US senators, the US ambassador and even senior US State Department personnel helped set Ukraine on fire. The February 2014 coup d’état began just as Vladimir Putin and Russia were focused on sport and the coming out party of Russia.
I wonder at the global view from Washington DC as I write this, and I shudder to think of the calculated recklessness of it all. That was a tipping point to make us question what US pretensions about freedom and democracy really mean.
Beneath the deafening noise of rocket fire across Donetsk and Luhansk, many of us found brothers and sisters fighting not just for peace, but for the essence of freedom itself. Make no mistake, the false narratives we are subjected to regarding Ukraine are signposts of freedom and democracy deconstructed and destroyed. It is in this fearsome reality the reader can find the real motivational component that serves “so-called” Kremlin Trolls. In the chapters to come the deep dark secrets of Vladimir Putin’s harbingers will be unmasked. The hard lesson for most will be accepting a new reality.
Chapter II: The Low Blows in Sochi