Will Sochi be ready for the Winter Olympics by the time of the opening ceremony on Friday?
According to a New York Times reporter newly arrived in Sochi, the Olympic landmarks are still under construction and the scene is a "peculiar mix of grandiosity and bungling," where a lit-up Christmas tree still adorns a hotel lobby, and an employee shrugs and offers "It's Russia!" as an explanation.
"There are unfinished hotels, half-finished stores and a mall where the only shop that is open and thriving is a Cinnabon," the reporter writes.
The Sochi Games are the most expensive Olympics ever staged. Government watchdog Alexey Navalny pegs their total cost at $46 billion (and others project up to $5 billion more). That surpasses even the $43 billion spent on the 2008 summer Games in Beijing, a far larger production that itself broke the Olympic spending record.
The Sochi Games have been plagued from the start. There are accusations of embezzlement on a massive scale. Now, just days before the first athletes start competing, it is clear the facilities are not finished.
The Times reporter lists the glitches. He inadvertently pulled off the handles of two doors in the poorly finished Bolshoy Ice Dome. A man walked into his hotel room at three in the morning, because he has been assigned the same room. The bus ride to the main media center offers little more than a vista of "a lot of dirt fields, dotted with newly planted trees, kept upright with twine."
Some errors are comic. A BBC reporter posted an image of a double toilet--two toilet bowls in one stall--at the Olympic Biathlon Center. After that image went viral, the bowls were quickly replaced by three free-standing cabinets. Later, a second double toilet bowl was discovered by an Associated Press reporter in the Olympic media center. A photo of a (possibly third?) pair of double toilets in action recently surfaced.
A series of photos taken January 23 show Sochi strewn with trash, huge piles of construction debris a mile from the Olympic park, and a half-finished hotel with metal studs bristling vertically out of its concrete walls.
With the opening ceremonies just three days away, the world waits to see whether the Russian organizers can fix their glitches in time.
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