Sochi Olympics legacy: Empty venues, fresh layer of corruption one year later
Source: Toronto Star
... It’s been an entire year since the Sochi Olympics began as the sun set over the Black Sea, with an opening ceremony full of colour and wonder and tributes to the art the government had been enthusiastically suppressing for an awfully long time. The whole thing felt like a scam from the start, of course. But it was pretty.
... The $8.5-billion rail line to the mountains is barely running. The condominiums that housed the media — those fields upon fields of identical, shoddily-built buildings, with tubs who caulking cracked and pulled them away from the walls, doors that mysteriously and irrevocably locked, window handles that split from the frame, and the defects of a thousand hurried construction workers — are reported to be largely empty. The mountain is a ghost town, with businesses closing down, which means it’s returned to the state it was in, well, three days before the Olympics started.
... Sochi was not only the pinnacle of waste and irrelevance, not even 3,000 years after the Greeks kicked the whole thing off. It was the most expensive, the most ridiculous, the most absurd, and everybody saw it coming. Sure, there were surprises: spending $51 billion still didn’t quite ensure that everything was ready on time, for instance, or how Russia reportedly sent snipers to Ukraine to put down a democratic revolution before the Games were even over. That whole thing is still going on, by the way.
... We are headed towards one of two possible paths, or at least a range of choices. One, the Olympics — and the World Cup, and the rest of the global sports festival circuit — will keep trying to milk as much money and architecture as possible out of the rich, heedless countries of the world: China, Russia, Qatar (home of the 2019 world track and field championships, and the 2022 World Cup), maybe even Kazakhstan. They will deal with dictators and presidents-for-life, and they will be bought. Or they can gradually try to conduct sports on a less grandiose, slightly more reasonable scale.
Read more: http://www.thestar.com/sports/sochi2014/2015/02/07/sochi-olympics-legacy-empty-venues-fresh-layer-of-corruption-one-year-later-arthur.html
