Since the 2000s, Russia’s federal authorities has tried to regain control over higher education by implementing reforms that force universities to compete with each other. The aim of this article is to analyze how universities managed to partly circumvent one of those reforms by developing an original mechanism of student recruitment known as Olympiads. Though this mechanism would seem at first sight marginal, it has in reality affected the whole system of student recruitment and, beyond that, the very functioning of the country’s university field. This article analyzes the Olympiad phenomenon in terms of inter-institution competition. At first used mainly by elite universities, it was soon taken up by other higher education institutions. Because of their unexpected success which went out of control, the Olympiads are now the subject of a regulation by the major universities and federal authorities. Russia’s Olympiads enlighten competitive practices between universities and what is at stake in them, as well as certain aspects of how political power has operated in Russia for the last fifteen years.