It’s five days before the start of the 2014 Sochi Olympic Winter Games and over three weeks, I’ve seen this small city (the suburb of the city, really) sweat it out to pull everything together in order to host thousands of athletes and hundreds of thousand more spectators and media.
The sub-tropical seaside resort popular with Russians (and almost no one else) suddenly a tourist destination for the world.
As the Washington Post declared, “The Russian host city of the 2014 Winter Games isn’t undergoing a simple facelift; it’s building an entirely new self, from head to toe to soul.”
The Sochi Winter Olympics could be renamed the Adler Games. The Olympic Park (where the hockey, figure skating, speed skating and opening/closing ceremonies are held) is located in a small, southern district of Greater Sochi called Adler. Aдлерin Russian.
Adler is its own town, but since Sochi runs for some 110 kilometers along the coast of the Black Sea, the bigger city includes Adler. We’re a few kilometres north of Georgia (or the region known as Abkhazia). But more on that in a later post.
Construction workers, engineers, electricians, window washers, brick layers, concrete pourers — six blokes smoking as they watched one man hold a shovel — they were all here to build this place. And pave it. The Olympic Park has a substantial ornithological reserve at its centre, that’s because the entire place was apparently once a seaside park.
My first day in the Olympic Park was two weeks ago on an afternoon that was also a photo shoot for these four guys:
The grass is newly laid:
The wiring a work in progress:
The saplings strung up:
Where Sochi 2014 will welcome the world to the Olympic Park and the Enterprise Olympic Cauldron:
