Everything you need to know about the Sochi Olympics

You see Sochi all the way over on the Caucasian (i.e., bad) side of the Black Sea. In the breakup of the former Soviet Union, Russia lost the choice parts of the Evil Empire's Black Sea frontage -- including Odessa and the Crimean peninsula (where Sebastopol and Yalta are) -- to Ukraine, so since then it has had to make do.

by Ken

My first idea was to run the above post head and then leave this space blank -- ha-ha! I mean, you don't need to know anything about the Winter Olympics, do you? Then I would have added the assurance that, as with most things, this too would pass.

But there are a lot of readers out there with serious questions about the festivities. So I thought we'd just do a quick Q&A to cover the basics.

Q: Where the [expletive deleted] is Sochi anyways, and how come I haven't heard of it.

Really, if we were going to try to list the places you've never heard of, we'd be hear all night and into March and April. But Sochi-oblivion can be forgiven, sort of. Until now it really hasn't been much of a place. (Unless you're from there, in which case this is just the sort of talk you hate.) As New Yorker Editor David Remnick recalls, Russian President Putin lobbied the International Olympic Committee's site selectors heavily "for the unlikely subtropical Black Sea resort of Sochi, which his generation knew mainly as a seaside town for mid-level Soviet apparatchiks and their vacationing families." The magazine's Adam Gopnik takes it a step further, calling the pre-Olympic Sochi "more or less the Asbury Park, or even the Sea Bright, of the Soviet Union."

At the same time, New Yorker financial columnist James Surowiecki, in "The Sochi Effect," describes the Sochi Olympics as --

a monument to Putin's Russia -- a nationalist showcase, intended to demonstrate just how far the country has come in the past two decades. It has also given Russia its first world-class winter resort, and has significantly developed the infrastructure of the Caucasus. In that context, overspending can become, perversely, a point of pride. The contractors on the Pyramids almost certainly padded the bills, too.

Q: But doesn't Surowiecki start out by saying, "Whatever happens on the ice and snow of Sochi in the next couple of weeks, one thing is certain: this Winter Olympics is the greatest financial boondoggle in the history of the Games"?

Yes. Surowiecki notes:

Back in 2007, Vladimir Putin said that Russia would spend twelve billion dollars on the Games. The actual amount is more than fifty billion. (By comparison, Vancouver's Games, in 2010, cost seven billion dollars.) Exhaustive investigations by the opposition figures Boris Nemtsov, Leonid Martynyuk, and Alexei Navalny reveal dubious cost overruns and outright embezzlement. And all this lavish spending (largely paid for by Russian taxpayers) has been, as Nemtsov and Martynyuk write, "controlled largely by businesspeople and companies close to Putin."

He adds that "conflicts of interest and cronyism are endemic" in the Russian economy, though he stresses that "the link between corruption and construction is a problem across the globe," and explores why construction is such a fertile field for corruption, especially where government spending is concerned, and even more especially in countries where the process of awarding contracts is "opaque," and where government "isn't accountable."

Worse still, even such "economic boost" as may result from "corrupt spending" is "an illusion, the equivalent of a sugar high."

Paolo Mauro, an economist at the I.M.F., says simply, "Corruption is bad for economic growth." It's well documented that corruption discourages investment, because it makes businesses uncertain about what it takes to get ahead; as one study put it, "Arbitrariness kills." Corruption also skews government spending. The economists Vito Tanzi and Hamid Davoodi found that corruption leads politicians to overinvest in low-quality infrastructure projects while skimping on maintaining existing projects. (It's easier to collect bribes on new construction than on maintenance.) And, in a pathbreaking study nearly twenty years ago, Mauro found that countries with high levels of corruption spent little on education. In economist-speak, corrupt politicians put too much money into physical capital and not enough into human capital. Crony construction capitalism leaves us with too few teachers and too many ski jumps to nowhere.

Q: Okay, okay, already. Just tell me, which is the good Olympics, the Winter or the, er, other one -- spring?

Probably you're thinking of the Summer Olympics, which include all those sports you can do outdoors without overcoats, like track and field plus swimming and diving and gymnastics and so on.

Q: Swimming and diving and gymnastics? Those are done indoors anyways, so why would they be limited to summer? Or vice versa with, say, figure skating and hockey?

Look, I don't make the rules. I guess the people who run the Summer Olympics got to the "hot" sports first. And you don't really think people who want to look at swimmers and divers and gymnasts and runners and such want to look at bundled up figure skaters and hockey players?

Q: What about that cute skater Johnny What's-His-Name? He's pretty hot, no?

Sure, but you notice that to be allowed to be really hot he has to stay away from venues like the Olympics.

Q: So the Summer Olympics are the good Olympics?

Well, a lot of people think so, like Washingtonpost.com's Alexandra Petri, who says straight out, "Even the weakest summer sports are more interesting than some of the strongest winter sports." This is no. 6 of Alexandra's "10 objections to the Winter Olympics," including how much less of the world is involved in winter sports ("The Olympics is supposed to be a world Games, not a Snow-World Games"), which she notes were far from being part of the Olympics' "founders' intent." ("There was no slalom in Ancient Greece.")

"Ah," I hear you say, "but what does it matter that the Winter Games are not as fun to watch? The Olympics, as a whole, are an exercise in pointless jingoism and spurious national camaraderie, and the actual subject of the competition is really of little significance. If there were a contest to see which nation's sons and daughters could make paint dry or reload a Web page most rapidly, we would still have to stand on the sidelines and chant, 'USA! USA!' What is so wrong with curling, anyhow?" And, well, if that's the way you feel, that's the way you feel. I think, though, that when the sport in question comes precariously close to the raw, madcap excitement of watching people try to cross a recently washed floor, you are entitled to ask whether it's really worth rounding up all of Sochi's poor wild dogs.

For the record, Alexandra loves ice dancing and figure skating but isn't much impressed that they make up "a full 2/21 of the competitive events" for the Winter Games.

Q: Then why even get involved with Winter Olympics, if you don't care about curling?

There are other views. The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik becomes almost poetic:

Winter sports are marginalized -- rather neatly marginalized by hemisphere, of course, and then doubly marginalized by tastes. Where with the Summer Olympic Games, every four years some big town makes a claim, usually failed, to cosmopolitan importance -- my shrinking, beautiful home town of Montreal is still burdened by its hideous Olympic Stadium, which helped to drive the Expos away -- in the Winter Games, every four years some small resort town perks its head above the horizon. Television hosts try to look cozy in bulky sweaters, warming themselves beside fake, made-for-broadcast hearths, people talk about the fun they had and the friends they made, and then the place goes back to being a small resort town. As David Remnick has explained, Sochi was, before these games, more or less the Asbury Park, or even the Sea Bright, of the Soviet Union.

Yet those of us with a mind for winter -- a love of the season -- still find something romantic in these games, for they commemorate, however remotely, a central nineteenth-century Romantic theme: the discovery of the paradox of speed in winter. This gives a certain fascination to even the smaller winter sports. Basically, where the summer sports show all the varieties of human action -- throwing, jumping, running, swimming, swimming the same way as someone else at the same time -- the winter ones share a single theme: what can be made of gravity and frozen water together. Curling, luging, skiing; even hockey, the king of sports, depends on the physics of a sharp edge on ice. It's a sliding festival that lasts two weeks.

The monotony of means should not blind us to the romance the sports superintend. As I said not long ago, in a series of lectures devoted to the subject of winter, in the nineteenth century, throughout Europe but in Russia above all, people discovered that the world could move faster in the cold months than in the summer. It was one of the most liberating physical discoveries ever made by modern people. While winter impedes comfort, it accelerates movement. Where mud and dust obscured the roads, and currents made the rivers slow going in Northern lands, the onset of winter ice turned them into corridors of speed.

On the other hand, Alexandra Petri complains (objection no. 8):

Almost every Winter Olympic event can be summarized as follows: Someone is on a plane of snow or ice (it can be flat, or inclined) and that person falls down or does not fall down. There are different ways of falling down or not falling down. The speed varies. The terrain varies. Sometimes there is music playing in the background. But if you see someone watching the Olympics and you ask, "Oh no, did the person on the snow or ice fall down?" you will blend right in to the conversation 100 percent of the time. This is wrong.

Q: Moving on, will media coverage of the Sochi Olympics be compromised by the tight media control exercised by the Russian government?

Quite possibly, but let's face it, media coverage was already going to be compromised by the billions and billions of dollars NBC Sports is shelling out for U.S. broadcast rights and for the actual coverage. That means coverage was always going to be built around dramatic "story lines," which will be plucked out or concocted by the TV people to maximize "human interest," meaning heart-string tugs, good-guys-vs.-bad-guys conflict, and appeals to raw chauvinism.

Q: Will the time difference have much of an effect on coverage?

Good question. Because Sochi is many, many time zones ahead of us -- on, um, Sochi Standard Time -- there are many, many hours' difference between there and here, in whichever of our time zones you happen to be in. In fact, it's so far ahead of us that it practically goes around to the other side and sneaks in behind us.

As a result of the time difference, things that have happened in Sochi haven't happened here yet, which means that we have to be very careful about "spoilers" slipping out of the Caucasus. As a last resort, you can stick fingers in your ears and chant, "Na-na-na-na-na-na" and so on.

Q: You sound like one of those stick-in-the-muds who doesn't have any use for either the good or the bad Olympics.

Pretty much, though Alexandra Petri does make one solid point, at least on behalf of the Summer Games (objection no. 4):

You can't tell if the participants are attractive or not because everyone is wearing layers that make them look like either those dancing windsocks outside used car dealerships or Power Rangers. "That's good, because I do not want to be distracted from the athleticism by lustful imaginings" was seldom said by anyone.

From the Sochi opening ceremonies

Well, enjoy. Remember there are a lot of NBC executives chugging antacids nonstop because they don't trust you to do your part for your country (and their sponsors). Just think: "USA! USA!"

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