Business Week and Spiegel Online report that all is not well in planning for the 2014 winter Olympic games in Sochi. As they put it, "So far things are a bit of a mess."
Their report notes that, "construction costs are rising and the oligarchs who are supposed to build the arenas for the Games are running out of money in the financial crisis." Indeed, in the last week almost a billion dollars in budget cuts have been announced.
But there's something just a little more fundamental at work here, namely, the original IOC decision to award the games to the Russian Black Sea resort. Sochi is maybe twenty miles up the road from an internationally contested hot spot, the once Georgian province of Abkhazia. On a line, it's maybe 200 miles from Tskhinvali, capital of the Georgian, but Russian-occupied, province of South Ossetia.
And scarcely 250 miles west of Sochi lies Grozny, ground zero in the vicious Chechen wars. Today's International Herald Tribune carries the following story: Chechen leader imposes strict Islamic code.
Business Week/Spiegel points out that there have been six bomb attacks in Sochi proper over the past year, and four people have died.
The last Russian games were the American-boycotted 1980 Moscow summer Olympics. Perhaps the IOC decided that after 34 years, it was Russia's turn again. We'll see how it turns out, but the Olympic Committee's wisdom at picking the Russian Caucasus looks a little dicey from here.
See photos of the Caucasus and Black Sea region in the Russia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan & Turkey galleries at EarthPhotos.com.
Comments