Alberto Pizzoli/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images Irina Rodnina and Vladislav Tretiak, two of Russia’s most decorated athletes, lit the Olympic caldron to open the Sochi Games on Friday. A legendary Russian ice skater who helped light the Olympic caldron to open the Sochi Games on Friday apologized on Monday for a racist photomontage of President Obama and a banana posted on her personal Twitter account five months ago.
Writing on the same Twitter account on Monday, the retired athlete, Irina Rodnina, who now represents President Vladimir V. Putin’s party in Parliament, claimed that her account had been hacked.
However, as the Russian journalist Evgeny Feldman noted, Ms. Rodnina had initially defended her right to share the image of the American president and his wife â€" which she said had been sent to her by someone in the United States â€" writing, “Freedom of speech is freedom of speech! Answer for your own hang-ups yourselves!â€
As the Russian state news agency R.I.A. Novosti reported in September, the United States Embassy in Moscow and the American ambassador, Michael McFaul, criticized Ms. Rodnina at the time for sharing the Photoshopped image.
Ms. Rodnina’s daughter is the Russian-American journalist Alyona Minkovski, a former employee of the Kremlin-owned satellite channel RT who now works for HuffPost Live. In a message posted on her Twitter account on Saturday, she defended her mother in words that seemed to suggest that the “insensitive†tweet was not, in fact, the work of a hacker.
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