Imagine if the BBC’s excitable commentators had been asked to cover the building of Sochi’s facilities, rather than the Winter Olympics themselves. ‘Yeesss!!’ Ed Leigh might have yelled, ‘That’s the 21st construction contract for the big lad from St Petersburg, Arkady Rotenberg. Seven point four billion dollars’ worth, a new Olympic record — more than the entire cost of the 2010 Vancouver Games! How cool is that for the 62-year-old who was Vladimir Putin’s boyhood judo partner? Up next, the $9.4 billion rail-and-highway link between Olympic sites: keep your eye on Russian Railways president Vladimir Yakunin, who used to be the President’s dacha neighbour…’
And so on through a roll call of Russian businessmen who have collected gold in Sochi, where the total cost of Olympic-related works is said to have passed $51 billion. Putin has personally driven the project, and when he fired one Olympic official — whose brother had the contract to build the ski jump — he declared: ‘The main issue is to be sure nobody steals anything.’
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