Video: Global News’ Stuart Greer takes us on a tour of the main Sochi Olympic site on the coast of the Black Sea.
Bleary-eyed from our midnight flight into Sochi, my cameraman and I are dragging our luggage over to the Gorki Panorama hotel in the Olympic Zone’s “mountain cluster.”
Walking toward us is an even more frazzled-looking guy with a big laminated media badge dangling from his neck and the slumped shoulder posture that is the unmistakable giveaway of the defeated journalist.
“Do you have rooms here? Are you staying here?” he asks us, recognizing some of his own.
We tell him yes, we are about to check in as a matter of fact. We’re looking forward to a bed and a bath and getting away from other reporters.
“You are so lucky,” he tells us. In the moment before we head up the gleaming new staircase we hear his sad tale of travel misery. He’s a Dutch newspaper reporter booked into a nearby hotel for the duration of the games. Although he was excited to be in a “new” hotel, he arrived to find a bathroom with no hot water, lights with no bulbs, room phones not yet hooked up and hallways full of construction dust and the peaceful sounds of drills and circular saws.
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Welcome to one of 2014’s premier international sporting events.
Heading here, everyone knew about the delays and challenges associated with these games. Moscow is shelling out billions of rubles to showcase the proud status of the “new Russia.” This is the first games they’ve hosted since 1980’s Summer Olympics, which were boycotted by much of the West because of Cold War tensions. This is their time, and they’ll spare no expense to get it right.
But while they seem to be making good on the cheque-writing side of the equation, it’s the final follow-through that could be the big problem. It’s one thing for the international press corps to bear the indignities of cold showers and no place to charge iPhones. We are, after all, professional complainers, I mean communicators, so people will rightly take our whining with a grain of salt.
It will be quite another thing though if the actual, real folks who are theoretically about to arrive here as spectators find themselves in similar circumstances. People like athletes’ families, curling fans from Saskatchewan, those kinds of folks. Just wait and see what happens if the world’s media start writing profiles about dentists from Regina driven mad by construction noise, or West Vancouver real estate agents who can’t find a hot yoga class.
I counted myself lucky this morning to get up in what seems to be a mostly complete, fully-functioning hotel. The elevators work. The breakfast was warm and good. But after a day of work I returned to see that impressive new staircase had been roped off with what looked like police tape and I had to walk in a side door.
What happened? I wondered. Had one of the steps cracked? Did the Dutch reporter return and vandalize it? No doubt one of the countless construction crews working around the clock here would soon be back.
With just a couple of days left before the opening ceremonies, you have to ask, how ready will they be?
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