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Sochi Winter Olympic 2014

singveld

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Russia gov against gays, why they build gay toilet?

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singveld

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A pest control company has been employed to deal with stray dogs at the Olympic Park in Sochi

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PHOTOS: An outcry over the fate of stray animals being rounded up in Sochi is the latest problem to dog Russia's preparations for the Winter Olympics.

Already scrambling to get hotels ready on time, make the Games safe and convince the world Russians are not homophobic, the host nation is now trying to shake off accusations that it is killing stray dogs.

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Ekaterina Galkina throws a stone during a curling match against Japan at the 2010 Winter Olympics. Source: News Limited
 

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Anna Prugova in action for Russia’s ice hockey team.

RUSSIA is courting controversy by featuring its female Winter Olympians in a racy underwear shoot just days out from the Sochi Games.

Twelve athletes from sports including ice hockey, curling, figure skating and skiing feature in the shoot.

The Russian website that first published the pictures boasted that its athletes were more feminine, with a loose translation that "Russian women's team refutes the stereotype that women in sport ... is a mountain of muscle and manly figure".

The site calls the shoot "the best campaign for our team in Sochi".
 

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sinkies have to be thankful that sewage doesn't get frozen and shit is flowing very smoothly in sg. :biggrin:
 

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Sochi Olympics Will Cost More Than Every Other Winter Olympics Combined

When the Winter Olympics open in Sochi, Russia this Friday, it will do so as the most expensive Olympics — summer or winter — in history. The first Russian Olympiad has earned that dubious honor thanks to various factors, namely the combination of the high cost of securing an Olympics in Russia’s disputed Caucasus region, President Vladimir Putin’s desire to make the Games as extravagant as possible, and alleged corruption that has marked the construction projects around the Olympics.
Sochi’s estimated $51 billion price tag is $10 billion higher than the next most-expensive Games, the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. On a per event basis, Sochi will spend five times more than the Chinese did in 2008. Take Summer Games out of the equation, and Sochi looks even worse: according to research from a Dutch newspaper, Sochi’s cost will total more than every previous Winter Olympics combined:

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The $51 billion cost is more than four times higher than the $12 billion cost Russia originally projected when it won the Games in 2007. Cost overruns for Olympics aren’t rare; according to University of Oxford researchers Allison Stewart and Bent Flyvbjerg, Olympic Games “overrun with 100 per cent consistency,” a feature that makes the Games unique among mega-spending projects. But even by the normal Olympic standard — the average cost overrun of Games between 1960 and 2012, the researchers found, was 179 percent in real terms and 324 percent in nominal terms — Sochi is worse.
Russia and Putin sold these Olympics as a marketing pitch for a “new Russia,” but the Russia the world has seen in the run-up to Sochi is so far unattractive. Coverage in the Western world has focused on security concerns, an anti-gay law that makes Russia inhospitable for LGBT people, and the corruption that has contributed to enormous costs, making it seem unlikely that Sochi will deliver the extremely costly message Putin wants to send. Sochi isn’t alone in its failure. The Brazilian World Cup and Rio de Janeiro Olympics have been marked by cost overruns that have drawn attention to insufficient public services and research showing that the Brazilian populace won’t reap the massive economic benefits supporters claim will follow the mega-events into the country. This is not unique to Russia and Brazil. It is the case at previous Olympics and World Cups too, in developing and developed countries alike. Sochi may seem abnormal, but it is nothing more than a larger instance of a problem that has plagued Olympic hosts for decades.
If the messages these events are supposed to sell aren’t delivered and if the benefits that purportedly follow don’t, the question is whether they are worth their cost. Would Russia have been better served by enacting policies and spending money in a way that actually creates the “new Russia” it wants to sell? Would Brazil be better off investing the $30 billion it plans to spend on the World Cup and Olympics into crumbling schools and hospitals, inadequate water treatment infrastructure, and programs to improve poverty and security in its favelas and cities? Would the entire world be better off if the International Olympic Committee and FIFA would hold their events in a way that didn’t demand a standard of lavishness for sporting facilities that inhibits countries large and small from meeting similar standards on projects that hold far more consequence and benefit for the people? And if the answer to all of those question is “yes,” as it seems to be, how do we change the way these events are sold and delivered to the public to prevent similar problems in the future?
 

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Total estimated costs of recent Olympics (including Games-related infrastructure)
Beijing 2008 $43bn

Vancouver 2010 $8.9bn

London 2012 $13.9bn

Sochi 2014 $51bn

Sochi 2014: the costliest Olympics yet but where has all the money gone?

What does $51bn buy you in a Black Sea subtropical resort these days? A heap of trouble, if the preparations for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi are anything to go by.

With 120 days to go until the opening ceremony, around half that sum is alleged to have disappeared in corrupt building contracts. At the same time, human rights concerns are mounting and global controversy caused by Russia's new laws forbidding "gay propaganda" refuses to go away.

And that's before you get to more prosaic concerns over whether there is going to be enough snow in a resort where temperatures reach 30C in the summer and remain a relatively mild 10C even in February.

Vladimir Putin this week launched the longest torch relay in Olympic history, a 40,000-mile route that will pass through all 83 regions of the vast country, from Kaliningrad in the west to Chukotka in the east.

At the earlier traditional flame-lighting ceremony in Olympia, Russia's deputy prime minister, Dmitry Kozak, spoke of the "difficult road" that organisers had travelled since the Games were awarded to Sochi following a dramatic last-ditch intervention from Putin in 2007.

Kozak clearly has a gift for understatement. While it has become traditional to list the myriad concerns facing Olympic organisers before an event then to hail it as a triumph afterwards, Sochi is setting a new bar.

Putin has long hoped that the twin "mega events" of the Winter Games in 2014 and the football World Cup in 2018 will showcase Russia's power and – just as was the case in various ways for the past three Olympic hosts in Beijing, Vancouver and London – boost its image in the eyes of the world.

So far, it has done little but justify the cynicism of those who characterise the Games as an offering to Mammon rather than embodying the lofty ideals that echoed around the walls of the Hilton Hotel in Buenos Aires when Thomas Bach was elected to succeed Jacques Rogge as the International Olympic Committee's president last month.

Like the IOC, the organising committee president, Dmitry Chernyshenko, has argued that it is unfair to conflate the money spent on infrastructure with the direct operational cost of the Games. But it is a line that is harder than ever to hold in an area that will struggle to make full use of all the upgrades when it reverts to being a luxury holiday resort after the Games. The initial $12bn (£7.5bn) cost has risen almost fivefold, with critics putting much of the inflation down to the corruption endemic in the Russian construction industry.

The opposition figures Leonid Martynyuk and Boris Nemtsov claimed in a May report that up to $30bn of the budget had gone missing in "kickbacks and embezzlement" to close associates of Putin, claiming the Games had turned into a "monstrous scam".

"An absence of fair competition, clan politics and the strictest censorship about anything related to the Olympic Games have led to a sharp increase in costs and a low quality of work," the report said.

An 18-mile road between Sochi, where events such as hockey, speed skating and figure skating will be held, and the mountain sports cluster of Krasnaya Polyana has become a symbol of the huge cost increases, spiralling to a reported $8.6bn. "You could have paved this road with five million tons of gold or caviar and the price would have been the same," Nemtsov said in an interview with the RBK television channel in July.

Visiting the site with one year to go until the Games in February, Putin sarcastically berated the official responsible and fired him shortly afterwards. "So a vice-president of the Olympic Committee is dragging down the entire construction? Well done! You are doing a good job," he said on camera to Akhmed Bilalov, who left the country for Germany shortly afterwards.

The transformation of Sochi and the ski runs in the nearby Caucasus mountains, plus the construction of the roads, hotels and utilities required, has required an influx of tens of thousands of construction workers, including 16,000 from outside Russia. A Human Rights Watch report accused firms contracted to build venues including the Central Olympic Stadium, the main Olympic village, and the main media centre of cheating workers out of wages and requiring them to work 12-hour shifts with few days off. The companies were also accused of confiscating passports and work permits, apparently to coerce employees to remain in exploitative jobs.

Then there are concerns over human rights and freedom of expression that extend to Russia as a whole but will be highlighted more than ever in the runup to the Games. Campaign groups claim that local activists and journalists who have criticised preparations for the Games have come under pressure to keep quiet. Stephen Fry, among others, has already called for a boycott of the Sochi Games over new laws that forbid "gay propaganda".

It is an issue that will run all the way to the opening ceremony and beyond. The IOC is walking a tightrope, declaring that it is happy with Russian government reassurance that the law will not affect athletes or spectators and that the Olympic Charter will be respected but adding that it has no business to interfere with national laws.

The extent to which the IOC is able to hold that line, the response of Russian police and security forces to any protests from campaign groups and the IOC's response to athletes that speak out on the matter or display solidarity with the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community by wearing rainbow colours will determine whether it becomes an issue that ignites during the Games themselves.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International has already voiced concerns over Putin's recent crackdown on freedom of expression, best exemplified by the Pussy Riot case. This week, the human rights organisation complained that a protest timed to coincide with the start of the torch relay against the lack of freedom of expression allowed in Russia had, with an apparent lack of irony, been blocked by authorities in Moscow.

It emerged last week that Russian authorities planned to limit public demonstrations and access to neighbouring territories during the Games, while local investigative journalists revealed that intelligence services have made wide-ranging amendments to networks in the area to allow for all pervasive monitoring of internet and mobile phone traffic.

By the time the Olympic flame reaches Sochi on 7 February next year for the opening day of the Games, along with 5,500 athletes from 80 countries, the total cost is likely to have spiralled further and the questions surrounding the most expensive and extravagant Olympics in history multiplied.

The huge expense and political controversy surrounding the Sochi Games will represent a baptism of fire for Bach. Part of his campaign ticket was to argue that the Olympics should become cheaper to bid for and host. He also admitted that politics and sport could not be separated in the modern world, while trying to cling on to the principle that the IOC had no right to interfere in sovereign states.

Such have been the wider concerns facing the Games that there has been little external scrutiny of the usual operational issues. Chief among them, as in Vancouver four years ago, is whether there will be enough snow. Organisers began stockpiling snow in February this year and will employ 400 snow machines to ensure they are not embarrassed.

Meanwhile, there are also concerns about whether the remote location will have an effect on the atmosphere and spectator numbers, particularly for the Paralympic Games that follow – prompting the authorities to cap rail and air prices to the region.

There is little doubt that the Sochi Games will be a success. With a price tag north of $50bn and so much political and personal capital investment by Putin, he cannot afford for them not to be. At what cost beyond the financial investment, and whether they will also inflict lasting collateral damage on an Olympic movement that claims to be in the throes of preparing for a new era, remains to be seen.
 

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the ‘iceberg skating palace’ forms a central part of the sochi 2014 olympic games, hosting figure skating and short track speed skating events. the scheme has been designed by GUP MNIIP mosproject-4, the ‘moscow research and design institute for culture, leisure, sports and health care buildings’. containing 12,000 seats positioned across two tiers, the multi-purpose arena has already successfully hosted major events.
 
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