SOCHI'S "RECORDS"

Major sporting events have long since ceased to be of a purely sporting nature and are liberally implicated in political and economic factors. In this respect the 2014 Winter Olympics became a record holder long before they even opened.

For example, most attention was drawn to the fact that a record 51bn dollars have been spent on the Olympics. A record number of Olympic committees are taking part in the Games and viewers from over 200 countries are watching the events. The 2014 Games will end on 23 February and 98 sets of medals are up for grabs, which is 12 sets more than in Vancouver, Canada, in 2010. And the Olympic torch has travelled a record journey - from outer space to the depths of Lake Baykal and to the top of Mount Elbrus.

The rumours and scandals surrounding the Olympics were also something of a record. For example, it was decided not to allow people championing the rights of those with unconventional sexual orientation who were striving to draw the attention of international sponsors to the treatment of sexual minorities in Russia to attend this important sporting event for which Moscow is responsible. The law banning the propaganda of unconventional sexual relations among adolescents was adopted in the Russian Federation last year and has caused quite a stir. Now, Marie Campbell, leader of All Out, the movement for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, believes, the law banning "gay propaganda" is contrary to the spirit of the Olympics. Elmar Brok, head of the European Parliament Foreign Affairs Committee, has urged his colleagues to take advantage of the visit to Sochi to again draw attention to human rights violations in Russia. The Russian authorities reject the criticism and say that no-one in Russia is being persecuted for homosexuality, but the law is necessary to "protect children and protect our future demographic development".

Journalists have expressed a different kind of indignation. Arriving in Sochi well before the start of the Olympics, they could see that hotels in the town were not ready to receive guests (those where work was being "finished off") - washing in a sink with rusty water is dangerous for the skin; walking in the corridors you could easily bump into a wandering dog or a builder; curtains come away when you draw them, and, of course, there is no connection to the Internet. Washington Post published a selection of "journalists' twitters about the horrors in Sochi": "There is no heating or Internet in my room, the lift is out of order and the fire exit is blocked," a Guardian journalist complained. A reporter from the Huffington Post admitted that his computer stopped working as soon as he arrived in Sochi, and his colleague from the National Post was dying for some hot water. But the real hit on the social networks were the photographs of "twin toilets" at the Olympic sites.

Responding to this, Aleksandra Kosterina, the press attach? of the Olympic Games Organizing Committee, admitted that "small tests", for which the organizers apologize, were "still going on" in some hotels for the press. At the same time, two days before the start of the Games, Thomas Bach, the head of the International Olympic Committee, confirmed that Sochi was fully prepared to host the competitions.

One of the most scandalous rumours surrounding the Sochi Olympics were the accusations of a record scale of corruption accompanying the construction work.  Incidentally, for some reason major sporting events in recent times have indeed been causing more and more disquiet among people (as, for example, happened during the summer Olympics in London in 2012) - the opponents of "big-time sport" say that the money would be better spent on other things, something more useful.

"Russia doesn't seem to care that it is spending stupid money on the Olympics - but it should…Expenditure is 2.5 per cent of the country's GDP," The Independent warns. Experts also believe that considerable damage was done to the environment during preparations for the sporting events.

Meanwhile, it seems that Russia is indeed not bothered. In an interview for international television companies, Russian President Vladimir Putin explained that the real cost of the sports festival was 214bn roubles (about 4bn pounds), and the rest of the expenditure went towards building the transport infrastructure. "Hundreds of kilometres of new roads and dozens of bridges and tunnels were built virtually from scratch in the mountains. "If anyone knows anything about corruption, share it with us," The Guardian says, quoting Putin's address to journalists. According to the Russian leader, the Olympics have become a national project, "the biggest building site in the world", which will "serve people for dozens of years to come". Besides this, during the crisis period of 2008-2010, preparations for the Olympics created several thousand new jobs. Putin also spoke about the importance of the propaganda of sport and a healthy way of life.

A separate - and arguably the most important - "record" subject in the run-up to Sochi-2014 was security. This question became more urgent after the recent terrorist acts in Volgograd, which is fairly close to Sochi. Unfortunately, terrorist acts are not such a rarity during sports events. The most notorious case, which happened recently, were the explosions during the international marathon in Boston (USA) last April. One of the worst terrorist acts occurred during the Munich Olympics in 1972 when members of the Israeli team were taken hostage while they slept by members of the Palestinian terrorist organization "Black September". A few days before the opening of the Games in Sochi Russia announced the setting up of an operational headquarters for members of the foreign special services. In addition, American warships were declared to be present in the Black Sea. In all, about 40,000 police and troops will be brought in to ensure security at the Olympics. Experts say that the main threat today comes from the network of small groups which are not inter-linked and therefore their activities are harder to predict.

A "political boycott" against Russia during the opening ceremony was also broadly discussed in the run-up to the Olympics. A number of foreign leaders refused to go to the Olympics, such as German President Joachim Gauck and French President and Foreign Minister Francois Hollande and Laurent Fabius. They were later joined by US leader Barack Obama, Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite, British Prime Minister David Cameron and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. In this context, of course, comparisons with the 1980 Olympics in Moscow during the "cold" war involuntarily come to mind. However, the Kremlin itself made no particular comment on this, but as far as the French president is concerned, they explained that they had not in fact sent Francois Hollande an invitation. For his part, IOC President Thomas Bach recalled that sports competitions should not become an arena for identifying relationships between politicians. 

However, it seems that the Russian president himself has no intention of avoiding politics and hopes that the Sochi Olympics will also become a "broad political forum".

But what about sport itself? Before the Olympics started one could, indeed, not fail to notice that there were not too many reports about the Games and the athletes themselves - for some reason the journalists spent more time in their rooms or on the Internet. Either that, or the latest reports were being shaped more carefully on social networks, which in itself is of some importance… 

And now for a little information about the technical aspect of the Games. As a small poll revealed, few of the spectators at the Olympics are aware, for example, of the difference between artificial and natural snow. Apparently, artificial snow (essentially, a special chemical mixture) is more suitable for professional competitions, as it is more hardy, resembles ice and even withstands above-zero temperatures.  Modern technology also allows last year's snow to be "conserved" - it is simply covered by thermal insulation materials.

The Olympics are often described as a festival of sport and a time for a truce throughout the world. If things have been somewhat tricky as regards the latter, and there have been cases where fighting has actually started during an Olympics, then mankind is surely capable of trying to maintain a feeling of a sporting festival for two weeks. The most important thing is that the Games remain a competition between athletes of their personal courage, strength of will, self-development, the beauty of their trained body and a feeling of joy from triumphs and records, and not a political competition between countries.

As far as Russia and its spending on the Olympics is concerned, then probably only the next few years, or perhaps decades, will really show what kind of result the country achieved at Sochi. Now, perhaps, is a great chance for the Russians to look at themselves from the outside.