Russia believes Sochi investment paying off Host of 2014 Olympics now vacation hotbed
SOCHI, Russia — On a warm autumn afternoon, skipper Anton Romanov nudged his 23-foot Aquador powerboat out of the relentless roll of the Black Sea and toward the harbor.
Dead ahead lay the busy port of Sochi, home of the 2014 Winter Olympics and Russia's most popular resort, with its restaurants, shops, five-star hotels and hawkers doing surprisingly brisk business selling trips on the pleasure boats lined up along the pier.
Beyond rose the jagged, white-tipped pyramids of the Western Caucasus range, a 45minute drive away along a river lined with compact settlements, each with more shops, restaurants and alpine hiking trails reached by ski lifts.
“You have to understand, there was nothing here just a few years ago,” Romanov said, pulling on a cigarette as he sat atop the cabin, legs dangling through the roof hatch, steering with his feet. “And nobody came here in October.”
They come now. Three years after the 2014 Games raised an outcry over the estimated $50 billion price tag, three years after the story of the Kremlin's Olympic folly was subsumed by Moscow's annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin has the all-seasons vacation destination that he promised in Sochi.
Sochi, prized for its subtropical climate and the thermal springs where Joseph Stalin treated his arthritis, was traditionally Russia's most popular summer destination. But it was neither a popular, nor particularly accessible, winter holiday spot before the 2014 Olympics.
“It was a summer resort. The season ended in October, and then you had to wait until the warm weather came back the next year,” said Andrei Ponomarenko, head of the G8 Language School in Sochi. “Now we are truly a yearround resort.”
City officials say Sochi, home to about 500,000 yearround residents, is on track to see 6.5 million visitors in 2017, the same as 2016. Hotels along the Black Sea coastline sell out in the summer, and the overflow is picked up by the hotels in the mountains, which offer shuttles to the beaches. The reverse happens in winter, when shoreline hotels offer bargain rates and transportation to the mountains for skiers. Dmitry Bogdanov, a Sochi travel consultant, says some hotels in high season are booked more than two years in advance.
Between seasons, the city hosts hundreds of events, including Formula One racing, Federation Cup soccer, singing competitions, festivals and conferences, according to Sergei Domorat, head of Sochi's Department of Resorts and Tourism. A recently opened casino just held a poker tournament. The Fisht Stadium, used for the Winter Olympic opening and closing ceremonies, will host matches when the FIFAWorld Cup comes to Russia next year.
The result, according to a manager of a seaside luxury hotel who spoke on the condition of anonymity, is that the property, filled to near-capacity in the summer, gets enough business in the offseason to average 60 percent occupancy for the year. “It's enough to make a profit,” the manager said.
In the past year, Domorat said, resort-related activities had pumped $55 million in tax revenue to the regional government. “The expendi- tures on Olympic construction have been justified,” he said.
It is hard to say exactly what was spent and where it all went. In 2013, opposition politicians published a report charging that Putin's inner circle had made off with $30 billion in what they called “a monstrous scam.”
Putin denied that largescale corruption had taken place, and government assessments of the spending have always attributed the cost to the difficulties in creating the infrastructure for the Games. The most costly item was the rail and roadway link to the mountains. Earlier, the beaches and the mountains were connected only by a narrow, winding road.
The years-long project to transform Sochi was controversial in other ways, too. Activists said authorities ignored laws that mandated public hearings for construction projects, illegally evicted residents, and damaged the environment in their construction efforts. Human rights organizations say that Russian activists protesting the Olympics were unfairly rounded up.
When the Olympics ended, tourism did not take right away. But Russia's ensuing recession, terrorism in Egypt and a diplomatic crisis with Turkey steered Russians away from the tourist destinations that had become popular after the fall of the Soviet Union and toward Sochi.
The government has also done its share, subsidizing tours for state employees and coaxing private companies to organize incentive trips and retreats to Sochi that might once have been held in Europe. Officially sponsored events fill the calendar.
Last month, foreign policy experts and officials were convening at a Sochi mountain hotel complex for a conference attended by Putin. The resort city was hosting more than 25,000 participants in the World Festival of Youth and Students.
One of those participants, Margarita Murzina, a graduate student from St. Petersburg, took advantage of a break in the program to ride a gondola 4,500 feet up a slope where Olympic alpine events were held. The ride itself was worth the trip: The gondola soared over a beech and oak forest of autumn yellows and oranges set beneath the snow-capped peaks. A snowboarding fan who had never been to Sochi, Murzina said she would definitely come back as a tourist.