2014 Winter Olympics

• 1. Introduction

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  The 2014 Winter Olympics, held in Sochi, Russia, sent an Olympic torch into space. Cosmonauts Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazansky waved it outside the International Space Station during a spacewalk. It was never lit, for safety reasons. The torch flew up aboard Soyuz TMA-11M and came back to Earth five days later on Soyuz TMA-09M. The spacecraft itself carried Olympic-themed livery and the emblem of the Games.

  Formally the XXII Olympic Winter Games, and commonly called Sochi 2014, the event ran from the 7th to the 23rd of February 2014. Why did a warm resort on the Black Sea win a winter bid? What did it take to build two clusters of new venues and the roads, rails and power lines to reach them? Who paid, and how much? And what did investigators uncover after the flame went out?

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• 2. A Vote in Guatemala City

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  On the 4th of July 2007, delegates at the 119th IOC Session in Guatemala City chose Sochi as host. Two bids lost: Salzburg in Austria and Pyeongchang in South Korea. In the first round, Pyeongchang drew 36 votes, Sochi 34 and Salzburg 25, which eliminated Salzburg. In the second round, Sochi won with 51 votes to Pyeongchang's 47.

  The result carried historical weight. Sochi became the first Olympic host in a CIS state and a former Warsaw Pact state. That milestone came after the Revolutions of 1989 and the Soviet collapse in 1991. It was also the first time the Russian Federation hosted a Winter Games. The Soviet Union had hosted the 1980 Summer Olympics in and around Moscow.

  These were the first Games under the International Olympic Committee presidency of Thomas Bach. The Sochi Organizing Committee, known as SOOC, ran both the Olympics and the Paralympics.

  Svetlana Zhurova, a former professional speed skater who became a deputy in the Russian State Duma, has said the Sochi Games were Vladimir Putin's personal project to show Russia to the world.

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• 3. Two Clusters

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  Sochi holds an odd record among winter hosts. With a humid subtropical climate and an average February temperature of 8.3 C, it is the warmest city ever to stage a Winter Olympic Games. Organisers answered the problem by dividing the Games into a coastal cluster and a mountain cluster.

  The Coastal Cluster, known as Sochi Olympic Park, sits on the Black Sea shore in the Imeretinsky Valley. It lies about 4 km from Russia's border with Abkhazia and Georgia. It was the first Olympic Park ever built for winter games. The venues surround a central water basin where the Medals Plaza stands, so every indoor venue is within walking distance. A choreographed fountain named The Waters of the Olympic Park, designed by the California company WET, formed the backdrop for medal ceremonies and for the opening and closing ceremonies.

  Fisht Olympic Stadium held 40,000 spectators for the ceremonies. Bolshoy Ice Dome held 12,000 for the ice hockey final, and Shayba Arena held 7,000 for hockey. Adler Arena Skating Center, with room for 8,000, hosted speed skating. Iceberg Skating Palace, also holding 12,000, staged figure skating and short track speed skating. Ice Cube Curling Center held 3,000.

  Up in the resort settlement of Krasnaya Polyana, the Mountain Cluster held the snow events. Laura Biathlon and Ski Complex handled biathlon and cross-country skiing. Rosa Khutor Extreme Park hosted freestyle skiing and snowboarding, while Rosa Khutor Alpine Resort hosted alpine skiing. Sliding Center Sanki ran bobsleigh, luge and skeleton. RusSki Gorki Jumping Center held ski jumping and Nordic combined, including a 2 km cross-country route around the arena.

  Sochi 2014 was the 12th straight Olympics to outlaw smoking. Every venue, every Olympic Park bar and restaurant, and all public areas were smoke-free.

  The venues kept working afterwards. A street circuit called the Sochi Autodrom was built in and around Olympic Park, and it hosted the first Formula One Russian Grand Prix in October 2014. In January 2015, work began to turn Fisht Olympic Stadium into an open-air football stadium for the 2018 FIFA World Cup. A new Kontinental Hockey League team, HC Sochi Leopards, now plays in Bolshoy Arena.

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• 4. Building a Resort

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  In June 2009, the Games' organisers reported that they were one year ahead of recent Olympic hosts in building the main facilities. The work followed a Federal Target Program. In November 2011, IOC President Jacques Rogge visited and concluded that Sochi had made significant progress since his previous visit eighteen months earlier.

  The transport work was enormous. It included 8 flyovers, 102 bridges, tens of tunnels and a bypass route for heavy trucks, with 367 km of roads paved in all. The Sochi Light Metro now runs between Adler and Krasnaya Polyana, linking Olympic Park, Sochi International Airport and the mountain venues. The existing 102 km Tuapse-to-Adler railroad was renovated to carry double track. In December 2009, Russian Railways ordered 38 Siemens Mobility Desiro trains for delivery in 2013.

  At Sochi International Airport, a new terminal rose beside a 3.5 km runway extension that overlaps the Mzymta River. At the Port of Sochi, a new offshore terminal 1.5 km from the shore can dock cruise ships carrying 3,000 passengers.

  In May 2009, Russian Railways began tunnel complex No. 1 near Akhshtyr, the first of six on the combined road and railway from Adler toward the Alpica Service mountain resort. Its escape tunnel, 2.25 km long, was finished in 2010. The road tunnel of 2153 m and the one-track railway tunnel of 2473 m were finished in 2013. Russian Railways president Vladimir Yakunin said the road construction cost more than 200 billion rubles.

  Power had to grow too. In late May 2009, Sochi's demand stood at 424 MW, and the Olympic infrastructure was expected to need about 340 MW. A five-year strategy presented on the 29th of May 2009 aimed to raise regional network capacity two and a half times by 2014. Projects included the Adler CHP station, completed in 2012 with an expected output of 360 MW, and a rebuilt Sochi thermal power station expected to produce 160 MW.

  The Federal Target Program set aside US$580 million for telecommunications. Avaya was named the official supplier of telecommunications equipment. Sochi 2014 was the first Games described as fabric-enabled, using Shortest Path Bridging technology, with a network able to handle up to 54 Tbit/s of traffic. Megafon added over 700 cell towers, and Sochi was the first Games to offer 4G at 10 MB/sec. Yet in November 2013, a fibre-optic cable built by the Federal Communications Agency, Rossvyaz, had no operator, because Rostelecom and Megafon both refused to run it.

  Six post offices opened at competition venues, and two new services appeared. Fotomarka produced a sheet of eight souvenir stamps bearing a customer's own photos. Retropismo let customers write on antique paper with their own pen, then add winding string and a wax seal.

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• 5. Money and Screens

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  By October 2013, the estimated combined cost of the Sochi Games had topped US$51 billion. The original budget was US$12 billion, and Vancouver in 2010 had spent about US$8 billion. The Sochi figure also exceeded the estimated US$44 billion cost of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, which hosted three times as many events. Dmitry Kozak was the main overseer for the Sochi projects.

  The state corporation Olimpstroy published a final budget in June 2014 totalling 1,524 billion rubles, or US$49.5 billion. Only about a fifth of that, US$10.8 billion, was directly tied to the Games. The rest paid for urban and regional regeneration and for turning the Sochi region into an all-year sea and alpine resort. Olympic venues accounted for about US$7.2 billion, and Fisht Olympic Stadium alone for US$617 million. The combined road and railroad linking the two clusters cost about US$10.3 billion. Estimates suggest unrecoverable operating costs, including security, could have added another US$3 billion.

  Critics read the numbers as a warning sign. Politician Boris Nemtsov cited allegations of corruption among government officials. Allison Stewart of the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford pointed to tight relationships between the government and construction firms.

  The audience was huge. The Games drew a record broadcast audience of 2.1 billion people worldwide. In the United States, they were the first event in a new US$4.38 billion contract between the IOC and NBCUniversal, running through 2020. NBC largely avoided material critical of Russia, and some commentators criticised segments as overly friendly to Russia.

  In Australia, all three major commercial networks pulled out of bidding because of cost. The IOC then awarded rights to the 2014 Games alone to Network Ten for A$20 million. Elsewhere, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation regained Olympic rights for the first time since 2008, after Bell Media and Rogers Media held the 2010 and 2012 Games.

  Sochi also served as a test bed for sharper pictures. NTV Plus and Comcast filmed portions in 4K resolution, and Panasonic filmed the opening ceremony in 4K. NHK went further and filmed portions in 8K for public viewing.

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• 6. Ceremony and Competition

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  The opening ceremony took place on the 7th of February 2014 at Fisht Olympic Stadium. Its scenes drew on Russian history and the arts, including ballet, classical music, the Russian Revolution and the Soviet age. The opening scene went wrong when one of five snowflakes failed to expand into the Olympic rings. Organisers poked fun at the mishap at the closing ceremony, where one dance group representing the rings pretended to fail in the same way.

  The torch entered the stadium in the hands of Maria Sharapova. She passed it to Yelena Isinbayeva, who gave it to wrestler Aleksandr Karelin, who handed it to gymnast Alina Kabaeva. Figure skater Irina Rodnina then took it and met former ice hockey goalkeeper Vladislav Tretiak. Together they left the stadium and lit the cauldron near the centre of Olympic Park.

  The flame had started its journey on the 29th of September 2013 in Ancient Olympia. The relay began in Moscow on the 7th of October 2013 and passed through 83 Russian cities. At about 60,000 km, it was the longest torch relay in Olympic history, stretching from Kaliningrad in the west to Chukotka in the east. The torch reached the North Pole aboard the nuclear-powered icebreaker 50 Let Pobedy. It also visited Mount Elbrus, Europe's highest mountain, and Siberia's Lake Baikal.

  The closing ceremony ran on the 23rd of February 2014 from 20:14 to 22:25 Moscow time. It celebrated Russian culture, with conductors Yuri Bashmet and Valery Gergiev, pianist Denis Matsuev and singer Hibla Gerzmava. Performers from the Bolshoi and Mariinsky theaters joined them.

  The competition set records. A total of 98 medal events across 15 disciplines in 7 sports made it the largest Winter Olympics to date. Twelve events were new, counting by gender. They included women's ski jumping, the biathlon mixed relay, mixed-team figure skating, mixed-team luge, half-pipe skiing, ski and snowboard slopestyle, and snowboard parallel slalom. Team alpine skiing and bandy were proposed but rejected by the IOC.

  A record 88 nations qualified, beating the 82 of Vancouver. Seven made their Winter Games debut: Dominica, Malta, Paraguay, Timor-Leste, Togo, Tonga and Zimbabwe. Malta's arrival meant that, for the first time, every current member of the European Olympic Committees had taken part in a Winter Olympics.

  India's story was unusual. After the Indian Olympic Association was suspended in December 2012, its athletes marched under the Olympic flag as Independent Olympic Participants. The association was reinstated on the 11th of February, and the athletes could then compete under their own flag. Shiva Keshavan stayed recorded as an Independent athlete, yet he was allowed to walk under the Indian flag at the closing ceremony.

  The medals were unveiled in May 2013. Their semi-translucent section showed a patchwork quilt of diamonds meant to evoke mountains, with designs reflecting Russia's regions. Gold medals awarded on the 15th of February held fragments of the Chelyabinsk meteor, marking the first anniversary of its fall into Chebarkul Lake in the Ural Mountains.

  Several events produced podium sweeps. On the 8th of February, Sven Kramer, Jan Blokhuijsen and Jorrit Bergsma took gold, silver and bronze in the men's 5000 metres of speed skating. Marit Bjørgen, Therese Johaug and Kristin Størmer Steira swept the women's 30 kilometre freestyle. The very last cross-country race, the men's 50 kilometre freestyle, ended with Alexander Legkov, Maxim Vylegzhanin and Ilia Chernousov in the top three places.

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• 7. Security and Dissent

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  More than 40,000 law enforcement officials, including police and the Russian Armed Forces, guarded the Olympics and Paralympics. A presidential decree signed by Vladimir Putin took effect on the 7th of January 2014. It required the Federal Security Service to approve any protest or demonstration in and around Sochi through the 21st of March, the end of the Paralympics.

  The media dubbed the controlled zones around the Coastal and Mountain clusters a ring of steel. Visitors passed through checkpoints with X-ray machines, metal detectors and explosive scanners. Sochi National Park and the border with Abkhazia were forbidden areas. An unmanned aerial vehicle squadron, S-400 and Pantsir-S1 air defence rockets, and four gunboats on the Black Sea protected the airspace and coast.

  Troops arrived in January. A group of 10,000 Internal Troops of the Ministry of Interior served at the Games, and 1,500 Siberian Regional Command troops were stationed in a military town near Krasnaya Polyana. About 400 Cossacks in traditional uniforms accompanied police patrols. The United States also supplied Navy ships and other assets. Meanwhile, communication and Internet traffic by Sochi residents was captured and filtered through deep packet inspection under the SORM system.

  The threats were real enough to shape these plans. In a July 2013 video, the Chechen Islamist commander Dokka Umarov called for attacks, saying the Games were staged "on the bones of many, many Muslims killed... and buried on our lands extending to the Red Sea". The group Vilayat Dagestan, which had claimed responsibility for the Volgograd bombings, also made threats. Several National Olympic Committees received e-mails threatening to kidnap or blow up athletes. The IOC said one such letter contained no threat and looked like a random message from a member of the public. The U.S. ski and snowboarding teams still hired a private security agency.

  Other objections concerned rights and history. Critics raised Russia's policies toward the LGBT community, including the denial of a proposed Pride House and a June 2013 federal law criminalising the distribution of "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships" among minors.

  Some Circassian organisations objected because the Games stood on land their ancestors held until 1864. That year, most Circassians were displaced at the end of the Russian-Circassian War in the Circassian genocide. Krasnaya Polyana, meaning Red Hill or Red Glade, was named for Circassians defeated in a bloody battle in 1864 while trying to return home over it. Some groups demanded the Games be cancelled or moved unless Russia apologised. Others asked only that Circassian symbols be included, as Australia, the United States and Canada had done for their indigenous cultures in 2000-2002 and 2010.

  After the closing ceremony, commentators judged the Games to have been successful overall.

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• 8. The Doping Case

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  In December 2014, the German public broadcaster ARD aired a documentary alleging that the Russian Olympic team had taken part in a state-run doping program. In May 2016, The New York Times published detailed claims from Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, the former director of Russia's anti-doping laboratory. He described a conspiracy of corrupt anti-doping officials, FSB intelligence agents and compliant athletes. He said the FSB tampered with over 100 urine samples and that at least fifteen Russian medals in Sochi were the result of doping.

  The World Anti-Doping Agency commissioned an independent report from Richard McLaren. It corroborated claims that Russian authorities had swapped out urine samples that tested positive. The program ran from at least late 2011 to August 2015 and covered up 643 positive samples across Olympic and non-Olympic sports. WADA judged the Russian Anti-Doping Agency non-compliant and recommended banning Russia from the 2016 Summer Olympics.

  The IOC did not impose that ban, a decision widely criticised by athletes and writers. It only required Russian athletes to be cleared by an internal panel and their sports federations. The IAAF suspended Russia from international track and field but allowed Darya Klishina to compete, since she was confirmed not to be part of a doping program. The International Paralympic Committee suspended the Russian Paralympic Committee and banned the team from the 2016 Summer Paralympics.

  On the 5th of December 2017, the IOC voted to suspend the Russian Olympic Committee. Russian athletes could not compete under the Russian flag at the 2018 Winter Olympics. Cleared athletes took part as Olympic Athletes from Russia. Two of them, curler Alexander Krushelnitskiy and bobsledder Nadezhda Sergeeva, failed drug tests during those Games.

  The IOC's Oswald Commission disqualified and banned 43 Russian athletes and stripped thirteen medals earned in Sochi. Among them, Alexander Legkov and Maxim Vylegzhanin lost their 50 kilometre gold and silver in November 2017. Forty-two of the 43 appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. On the 1st of February 2018, the court found the evidence insufficient and cleared 28 athletes. Russian athletes won back nine of the thirteen medals, including those of Legkov and Vylegzhanin. For 11 others, the court upheld the Sochi sanctions but reduced their lifetime bans to the 2018 Winter Olympics only.

  The IOC warned that the decision did not mean the 28 athletes would be invited to Pyeongchang. It added that the court's secretary general insisted the ruling did not declare them innocent. Later that month, the IOC reinstated the Russian Olympic Committee. The Russian Anti-Doping Agency was re-certified in September, even though Russian officials had not accepted the McLaren report.

  Just 4 days after the closing of the Games, Russian troops entered Ukrainian Crimea. Russia formally incorporated Crimea into its territory on the 14th of March 2014. It was the second of three times, in 2008-2014 and 2022, that Russia under Vladimir Putin invaded a neighbouring country during or just after the Olympics. Some reports suggested the annexation of Crimea may have been meant to distract Russians from corruption stories about the Games.

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