A month ago, Russia’s biggest challenge in pr­eparing to serve as host for the 2014 Winter Oly­mpics seemed to be just mustering the resources to build the facilities in Sochi, a downtrodden Soviet-era resort town. Now, a new an­xiety is gripping the country: if its athletes perform as badly as they did in Vancouver last month, Russia could be humiliated in its own backyard.

The Olympics, a measure of national pride anywhere, means even more in Russia, heir to the vaunted Soviet teams that fought cold-war proxy battles aga­inst the West every four years. On the snow and ice of the Winter Olympics especially, the Soviets dominated, winning the most gold medals seven of the nine times they competed.

With so much invested in winning, losing has produced a moment of national shame. Russia won a meager three gold medals in Vancouver, coming in sixth in the overall medal count. President Dmitri A. Med­vedev has called for heads to roll and so far one has, that of the president of Russia’s Olympic Committee. Russia’s leaders have now staked their country’s prestige on the success of the Sochi Olympic Games, and this success includes running up the medal count, which prime minister Vla­dimir V Putin has called a priority.

For a primer on how a once mighty sports machine has ended up in such dire circumstances,consider the record of the luge team.

The Soviet Union had about 40 luge tracks, said Valery N Silakov, the former head coach for the Soviet luge team and the current president of the Russian Luge Federation. Now, Ru­ssian lugers have almost nowhere to train.

“Russian junior athletes only began participating on all levels of the Luge World Cup about four years ago,” he said. In fact, success or failure in Sochi will depend largely on athletes like Albert Demchenko, Russia’s most successful luge competitor. And at 38, he is rapidly passing his prime.

“For the last several years, the team has depended only on me,” he said. In six Olympics, he has never won gold, and he finished a disappointing fourth in Vancouver. There have been problems to varying degrees across the spectrum of Oly­mpic sports, even in areas like hockey and figure skating where Russia has traditionally excelled.

Medals aside, the Sochi Games were going to be a challenge, anyway. In what could be one of the most expensive Olympic projects in history, Russia must build almost everything in Sochi from scratch, fighting unforgiving terrain, a propensity for corruption and volatile neighbors in the nearby North Caucasus region.