Russia faces Olympic hurdle
A few dark clouds hang over next Winter Games
LONDON — Sochi, the Cossack city on the Black Sea, where the next Winter Olympics are to be held in February 2014, is hardly a household word, even in Russia.
To become better known, Sochi’s organizers provided a foretaste of their Games in a massive warren of tents that they purpose-built in Hyde Park. For two weeks during the 2012 Summer Games, huge crowds of Londoners and visitors were able to catch a cool film about Sochi, participate in a series of slick audio-visual displays and games about the Olympic winter sports, and witness a classy ice show in a temporary rink where most of the big names in Russian figure skating — six Olympic and 18 world champions — spun their magic every night.
If the Sochi Games are half as well done as the show in Hyde Park, they will be a triumph. But for Russians as for Canadians, there is a dark cloud hanging over the next Winter Olympics.
It arises because of uncertainty over whether Gary Bettman’s hockey circuit will try to deny NHL players a chance to play in Sochi. In a narrow sense, this doesn’t matter to the Russians. Their top NHL players have said they will ignore the commissioner if he and the NHL owners rule that the players can’t go.
But national prestige is on the line and every Russian badly wants the Olympic hockey tournament to be the best possible. That means having Sidney Crosby and other top Canadians facing off against the likes of Alexander Ovechkin, Evgeni Malkin, Pavel Datsyuk and Ilya Kovalchuk.
Russia has two other concerns similar to the ones Canada had coming into the Vancouver Olympics two years ago. But each of them is of greater importance to Russians. Many still believe their country is a superpower, so they have superpower expectations about what Russia’s first Winter Games should be like.
Russians fret about whether the “show” put on by Sochi will be sufficiently spectacular. More important than that, there is universal agreement that the team, which failed the nation two years ago in Vancouver by placing 11th in gold medals with three to Canada’s 14, and sixth in overall medals with 15, must become world-beaters again.
Russian winter-sports prestige resides almost entirely in two sports. The figure skaters, with their connections to the grand traditions of the Bolshoi and the Kirov, remain a force but are not as dominant as they once were. The same also can be said of the national hockey team, which in recent years has often been hobbled by internal bickering and what sometimes appears to be a lack of commitment.
The Russian ambition is to make the kind of big statement that the shock and awe of the Beijing Games did for China in 2008. To produce such an outcome, Russia is lavishing about as much money on the Sochi Olympics as Great Britain spent on the much more diverse and diffuse 2012 Summer Games and about three times more than Canada spent on the Vancouver Olympics in 2010.
The Kremlin can afford to spend $19 billion on the Sochi extravaganza because, like the Chinese leadership, it presides over a command economy. Supported by fantastic oil and gas revenues, the Russian government can also lean on the country’s hugely rich corporations to pay much of the freight because of the profound inter-relationships that exist between the oligarchs and the political centre.
The Sochi Games are to take place over 17 days. By the numbers, about 5,500 athletes from 80 countries will compete for 98 gold medals, which is 12 more than in Vancouver. As many as 80,000 visitors are expected in the city of 350,000, which is 1,360 kilometres south of Moscow or almost exactly the distance between Montreal and Raleigh, N.C.
It seems counter-intuitive to hold a Winter Games at a summer-beach resort. But that is what the International Olympic Committee did when it awarded them five years ago. Sochi will be the balmiest city to host a Winter Olympics, taking that dubious title from Vancouver.
The first of two distinct Olympic clusters is being built among the palm trees of Sochi, where hockey, figure skating, speedskating and curling are to be held. The other cluster for the alpine events is 48 kilometres and 30 minutes away. The two Olympic parks and villages are to be connected by highway and high-speed rail links that are being blasted at enormous cost through hills surrounding the Black Sea resort.
Ominously, the nearby mountains of the southwestern Caucasus get less snow in a good winter than Whistler, where Vancouver’s alpine events were held, does in a bad one. Sochi’s micro-climate is subtropical with daytime-winter temperatures usually well above freezing. With the highest mountain barely reaching 2,000 metres, the potential for snow trouble is obvious.
So, more than any other Winter Olympics, the success of the alpine and cross-country events in Sochi will depend on the snow cannon. Organizers must hope that it is colder than 10C so that an armada of more than 400 snow-making machines can be unleashed.
But not for nothing is an emergency supply of several hundred thousand cubic metres of snow to be kept on ice in underground res- ervoirs.
A dearth of snow is not the only potential danger to the Sochi Games. The city is not far to the west of the notoriously restive Islamic republics of Chechnya and Dagestan and close to other problematic territories such as Abkhazia, North Ossetia and South Ossetia.
Russia’s trump card is that President Vladimir Putin, who recently started playing hockey, has taken an intense personal interest in the success of the Sochi project. The Russian strongman is said to have been hugely disappointed by Russia’s disastrous performance in Vancouver. It is likely to be quite unpleasant if that history repeats itself in Sochi.
fisherrmatthew@hotmail.com