All the astonishing “numbers of the day” I’ve been hearing lately are connected with the Olympics: Over six years, according to the Ministry of Regional Development, the cost of preparing Sochi for the Olympics rose from 320 billion to 1.5 trillion rubles.
(well, they were only a tiny bit off, so why make a fuss) 2. As of yesterday, money for the Olympics is being spent at a rate of 1.05 billion rubles a day. 3. They expect to make $250 million from selling ALL tickets for the Sochi Olympics, while the cost overrun on just ONE facility—the one Bilalov was fired over—was $230 million. If only the money stolen from that one facility were recovered, the Olympics could be made free for all citizens of the Russian Federation. Presumably, if the stolen money from three facilities were recovered, it would cover round-trip tickets and accommodation for everyone who wanted to go. At the very least, every child in Russia studying at a sports school and regularly attending athletic clubs could be sent to watch the Olympics for free. You can dream and speculate along these lines quite a bit more. Egor Bychkov did it best in his absolutely brilliant post. Unfortunately, “dream” and “speculate” are the key words here. There will be no free tickets, and no swimming pools and ice palaces in each of Russia’s 1,100 cities. Well, that is, there will be pools and palaces—but at a considerable distance from those very Russian cities. In those pools, people will be able to swim for free and drink champagne. But not everyone. It’s exactly the same story as with Transneft, only on a colossal scale and in full view of the entire country. So as not to end on a gloomy note, here are a couple of photos from yesterday’s celebration: the ceremonial concert “Exactly One Year Until the Olympics.”
They probably spent a billion on that too.
Places