Last week Russia turned in another one of its spectacular flameouts in the world of sports.

First, Russia’s top-ranked female tennis player, Maria Sharapova (pictured,left), was blown off the court in easy straight sets in her second match at The Championships in Wimbledon by a player who had never before won a match at the tournament, was unseeded and was not ranked in the world’s top 150 players. The loss came just hours after Sharapova learned that Russia had refused her request to carry the national flag at the Beijing Olympiad opening ceremonies. The request was inexplicable coming from a person who has in the United States since she was a child, learned her game there and never spends any time in her so-called “homeland.” It was one of the most disgraceful exits from the tournament by a player who had previously won it in history, and it’s not the first time Sharapova has embarrassed herself this way at the All England Club.

But Sharapova at least did better than Russia’s top-ranked male player, the infamous Nikolai Davydenko (embroiled in a match-fixing scandal), who also crashed and burned spectacularly at Wimbledon. He lost his opening match in easy straight sets to an unseeded German not ranked in the world’s top 100.

Then to make the nightmare complete, Russia’s national football team (albeit coached by a Dutchman) lost its second match of the Euro tournament to Spain even worse than it had the first encounter the week before, which had been an outright massacre. This time Russia didn’t manage to score a single goal. It was outscored by the Spanish by a devastatingly decisive margin of 7-1 over the course of the two matches.

Russia had adopted its usual strategy for motivating its football side to victory. Faced with a declining population (which is expected to halve over the course of the next century) the Putin government’s only response was to bribe parents to have more kids. In a similar manner, a Russian oligarch promised to give the football side unlimited access to expensive prostitutes if only they would eke out a win.

After beating the tiny countries of Sweden, Greece and Netherlands to earn a semi-final bid, the arrogance was flying fast and furious in Russia, as only Russians can manufacture it. Russians swarmed the streets of Moscow declaring themselves “champions” and Russian Midfielder Konstantin Zyryanov stated: “We have beaten two very strong teams, I think this improves our chances. I want to play Spain [in the semifinal]. We made lots of mistakes against Spain [in the group match] and now we have fixed them very quickly.” Ouch. Be careful what you wish for there, Konstantin.

What Russians should have done after making the semis was to say to themselves: “Gee, we don’t have a very good team yet we’ve done pretty well by hiring ourselves a foreign coach who’s dramatically changed the way we play. If we go on this way, we might be able to coach ourselves one day, and maybe even win this tournament.” Instead, Russians gave vent to a level of hubris (and, indeed, outright xenophobia) that can only flow from the sure and certain knowledge, deep inside, that you’re nowhere close to being good enough and don’t want to put forth the effort to become so.

Russian pundit Alexei Bayer has an excellent piece in the latest issue of the Moscow Times highlighting what Russia could have learned, but refuses to, from Euro 2008. Instead, Russia continues madly down the path of xenophobia and arrogance that has led to so much failure in the past.

Maria Sharapova is surely one of the most grotesquely overrated figures in professional sports. Take a look at her, at right, talking to the press after being summarily ejected from the French Open tournament just a few weeks ago, again by a much lower-ranked player, or at the top of this page, in both instances stripped of the power of makeup and air-brushing. Then ask yourself how well-deserved her vixen reputation is. Reflect on her record. She won the Wimbledon title a few years ago, and how did she do it? She was being routed by American Lindsey Davenport in a semi-final match when suddenly, miraculously, it started to rain and the match was stopped. When it resumed later, Davenport had lost her concentration (she would soon retire from the sport) and Sharapova claimed “victory.” What can you say about a player who spends all her time in one country then wants to carry another’s flag in the Olympics?

Sharapova is Russia in microcosm. The country seems to prefer to imagine it is winning rather than do the hard work of actually winning. Sharapova is as much an American as as Russian, probably much more so, and the coach of Russia’s football team is Dutch. Sharapova trades on air-brushed beauty rather than hard work and improvement, but that won’t sustain the sport of women’s tennis. No Russian woman who lives in Russia has ever held the number one ranking or won a grand slam title by beating a non-Russian in the finals, and no Russian woman has ever won any tournament while ranked number one. Yet, some people talk about “dominance” by Russian women in the sport. Instead of seeing a basis for hard work and improvement, Russians see only a reason to sit on laurels that don’t even really exist.

It’s the same in politics. Russians allow their dictator, Vladimir Putin, to claim credit for economic gains that have nothing to do with his polices and everything to do with the accident or rising oil prices. Instead of investing Russia’s oil windfall in building a better society, Russians allow Putin to spend it on whipping up a new cold war with the United States and seeking to reaquire imperial control over places like Ukraine and Georgia, control which was lost because the USSR behaved in an equally self-destructive manner.