They don’t want the Olympics. And they even dragged Yabloko (a Russian liberal political party) into it: "Alpine skiing is a sport alien to Russia, and Russia is constantly trying to adopt alien habits and pastimes," Ivan Tsoi, head of the Green Patrol of Krasnodar Krai, explained to those around him. His fellow activists, many of whom were wearing T-shirts with a crossed-out Olympic bear, chanted: "Seoul — yes! Sochi — no!" http://www.kommersant.ru/doc.aspx?DocsID=716899 I want to wake up tomorrow and find out that the Olympics will be in Sochi. And then that hellish eco-extremist vkuzn will lose a bottle of cognac to me. It’s interesting, really: what would Putin have to build for even the “liberal public” to support him? It seems to me that if he announced that the world’s largest children’s hospital would be built in Russia with UN money, we’d hear cries of, "We don’t need a children’s hospital—let them build it in Austria, otherwise all the money will be stolen here and nature will be ruined."