World press review on preparations for Sochi Olympics (February 18, 2013)

Russia is getting ready to showcase the resort town of Sochi, host of

the next Winter Olympics, and its snowboarding and skiing venues.

President Vladimir Putin is said to be sparing no expense on the

Games. The Washington Post devotes an article to the preparations for

the Olympic Games 2014.

"The frenzy of construction for the Winter Games enveloping this city

has local people feeling as if the Greek gods of old were flinging one

Olympian thunderbolt after another at them as they helplessly endure,"

the article begins.

The newspaper stresses the high human costs of the Olympic projects,

both for the construction workers and the local population:

"Bulldozers have torn the neighborhood of Mirny, near the giant

Olympic media center, in half to make way for new buildings and

highway interchanges. Many of the construction workers are migrants,

especially from Central Asia, who get miserable wages and sometimes

are not paid at all, according to a Human Rights Watch report issued

this month. And every day residents of the small settlement of

Kudepsta gather near their backyard stream a few miles from the

Olympic ice rinks, ready to block heavy equipment with their bodies in

an effort to fend off construction of a thermal power plant they

contend will poison them."

"To make way for the Games, about 1,500 families have been forced to

leave their homes, according to HRW. In some neighborhoods, such as

Mirny, most houses have been torn down, but a few remain there, lonely

islands surrounded by construction. Some have lost their houses

without compensation because titles, received during chaotic

post-Soviet days, were not always clear," writes the Washington Post.

“It’s only going to get worse when the Olympics are over,” the

newspaper quotes one of the local residents, “because the journalists

will be gone and anything can happen.”