The Olympics are often a corrupt train wreck, but the 2014 games in Sochi, Russia have real potential to combine the worst of Beijing (political repression), Salt Lake City (bribery), Sarajevo (war, though that was after the fact), and Athens (total economic irresponsibility, as well as general uselessness and destructive national pride).
I won’t go as far as making the Hitler in 1936 example, but Sochi in 2014 is Vladmir Putin’s 12 billion dollar baby and could showcase all the ugliness that implies.
Oh, and the weather.
See, Sochi is not cold. And cold is just kind of, sort of needed for the Winter Olympics.
I have covered or worked at two Olympics - Salt Lake City in 2002 and Athens in 2004. I had magic times at both. That whole Olympic spirit thing is real.
But that has nothing to do with the International Olympic Committee or the costs of the games and their relative worth to places like Russia. Organizers hope to transform the entire Sochi region into a world class resort. Good luck. I’ve been to Olympic venues in Stockholm, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Atlanta, Athens, Salt Lake City, Squaw Valley and Moscow. There was little transformative about any of them.
Let’s start with Boris Nemtsov, an opposition politician in Sochi, among other things, who gave an interview to Foreign Policy ripping the entire concept of the Olympics there:
Roughly 5,000 people have been forced out of their homes to make room for the Olympic facilities, and thanks to the corruption and incompetence of authorities, have not yet been adequately compensated for their property or been given equivalent housing elsewhere, as they were promised. Billions of dollars have simply disappeared. All this sacrifice is for facilities that will most likely not be used when the games are over.
Then you got environmental concerns, as in the authorities could rape pristine and endangered forests and rivers in the North Caucuses. Read about that here.
And do not count on getting much good watchdog journalism about Sochi either, certainly not from the Russian media, says Reporters Without Borders in a Reuters piece.
Plus you got security concerns from the threat of terrorism from places like Chechnya, not to mention angry opposition and insult throwing from defeated but nearby Georgia.
And I would not want to be a Russian Olympian in Sochi, not after the Russian’s abysmal showing in Vancouver, to go with the suffocating pressure to succeed as a nation in Putin’s Russia of oil and propaganda.
Photo by Alessio85
