Sports minister Vitaly Mutko announced that around 1.4 billion US dollars will be spent on sport in the country next year.
“In the state budget for 2011, 43 billion rubles will be spent on sport, in general,” Vitaly Mutko said. The minister stressed that it will not only be about helping professional athletes. “Almost a third of this money will be spent on amateur sport. Right now we have around 25 million Russian people who do sport on a regular basis. And our main goal is to increase this figure to 28 million,” he added.