Russia's top-ranked player Maria Sharapova was blown off the court in easy straight sets in her second match at The Championships in Wimbledon last week by a player who had never before won a match at the tournament, was unseeded and 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 certainly an odd one coming from a person who lives in America and never spends any time in her so-called "homeland."

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.

And to round things out nicely, 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, which was a massacre. This time Russia didn't manage to score a single goal and was eliminated from the tournament after much posing and strutting by the Russian nationalist crowd. Hard to imagine how the Russian side could have surrendered so meekly not once but twice . . . after all, they'd been bribed with whores and everything. What more motivation could they possibly have required?