The Sochi problems are more than a funny tryst.
A hotel bathroom that traps contestants, rusty water works, magically changing room keys, for Americans these are all frustrating but amusing nuisances to tweet about.
These dearths in quality are only magnified and expanded in the lives of the average Russian citizen. But the corruption runs deeper. If we stop to think about these implications, about consequences of Putin’s narcissistic fantasy, they begin to hold more water, so to speak.
Los Angeles Times’s Bill Plaschke writes that “the strong-armed dream of Russian President Vladimir Putin has thus far succeeded not in embellishing the Olympic motto, but altering it, from ‘swifter, higher, stronger’ to, ‘unfinished, unsettling and uninviting.”
The quality of the hospitality is fairly unsurprising considering the conditions of the construction, however.
As Ukrainian worker Maxim told Human Rights Watch about his experience in construction for the Olympics: “People work, they don’t get paid, and leave. Then a bus comes and unloads a fresh group of workers to repeat the cycle.”
Is the shoddy construction really a mystery when the gold plated Olympic town was built practically with slave labor?
This deplorable situation is the result of Putin’s idealism and lack of capability, shortcomings hinted in Sochi and evidenced in his policy.
