The Moscow Times published an article headlined 'Why Sochi Is a Terrible Choice for the Olympics.' The author of the article, Alexey Bayer, tells a story about a Russian man who, while skiing, found an iPhone that someone had lost and took it to the local police station. For his trouble, he was arrested, beaten and put on trial after spending four months in pretrial detention.
"Tales of police brutality, incompetence and venality of courts and long sentences for the innocent no longer elicit surprise or outrage in Russia. What's significant about this case is that it took place in Sochi, the site of the 2014 Winter Olympics. The man was skiing at the future Alpine venue Krasnaya Polyana. In his prison diary, he alleges that the police, prosecutors and judges run a criminal organization that extorts money and steals businesses from innocent people by keeping them in jail until they pay up," the article reads.
"The Sochi Olympics is an exemplary Russian government project. It is a huge white elephant set in a completely unsuitable location — a summer resort with little infrastructure for winter sports — and the recent devastating floods in the Krasnodar region are another reminder of this," the author says.
"Corruption is endemic in Russia, and almost everything the government undertakes involves stealing and misallocation of funds. Cost overruns are massive. The original $8.5 billion budget may balloon to over $35 billion, making it more costly than the three previous Winter Olympics combined. Misappropriating these enormous sums of public and quasi-public money involves a vast network of corrupt officials at every level in both the Sochi municipal and the Krasnodar region governments," the article says.
"The International Olympic Committee should have thought twice before it awarded the Olympics to Sochi five years ago. It must now take partial blame if the lawlessness that we are currently seeing continues into the games — if, for example, a fan is arrested and beaten in police custody during the Sochi games, or if a police officer acts as a lookout for thieves and murderers of visitors to the games," the author concludes.
