"SNOWY" OLYMPIC GAMES = 2014 SOCHI WINTER OLYMPIC GAMES

Sochi 2014 Winter Olympic Games Logo

February 7th is the opening ceremony for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympic Games in Russia. The extent to which you know the implementation of the Olympic Games? Here's the brief review of the 2014 Sochi Winter Games Oympic. Check This Out!!

The 2014 Winter Olympics, officially the XXII Olympic Winter Games, or the 22nd Winter Olympics, is a major international multi-sport event being held in Sochi, Russia. Officially scheduled for 7 February through 23 February 2014, opening rounds in figure skating, skiing, and snowboard competitions were held on the eve of the Opening Ceremony, 6 February 2014. Both the Olympics and 2014 Winter Paralympics are being organized by the Sochi Organizing Committee (SOC). Sochi was selected as the host city in July 2007, during the 119th IOC Session held in Guatemala City. The Sochi Olympics will be the first Olympics in the Russian Federation since the breakup of the USSR in 1991. The USSR was the host nation for the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow.

98 events in 15 winter sport disciplines will be held throughout the Games. A number of new competitions—a total of twelve accounting for gender—will be held during the Games, including biathlon mixed relay, women's ski jumping, mixed-team figure skating, mixed-team luge, half-pipe skiing, ski and snowboard slopestyle, and snowboard parallel slalom. The events will be held around two clusters of new venues; an Olympic Park was constructed in Sochi's Imeretinsky Valley on the coast of the Black Sea, with Fisht Olympic Stadium and the Games' indoor venues located within walking distance, and snow events will be held in the resort settlement of Krasnaya Polyana.

In preparation for the games, organizers focused on modernizing the telecommunications, electric power, and transportation infrastructures of the region. While originally budgeted at US$12 billion, various factors caused the budget to expand to over US$51 billion, surpassing the estimated $44 billion cost of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing as the most expensive Olympics in history.

The lead-up to the 2014 Winter Olympics was marked by several major controversies, including allegations of corruption leading to the aforementioned cost overruns, concerns for the safety and human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) athletes and supporters during the Games due to the country's recent ban on the promotion of LGBT relationships to minors, which led to ongoing protests, and various security concerns over threats by jihadist groups tied to the insurgency in the North Caucasus.

Fisht Oympic Stadium under construction

According to Sochi 2014 Olympic and Paralympic Organizing Committee President and CEO Dmitry Chernyshenko, partnership and commercial programs allowed the use of funds generated by Sochi 2014 for the 2009–10 development period, postponing the need for the state funds guaranteed by the Russian Government. He confirmed that the Organizing Committee had raised more than $500 million through marketing in the first five months of 2009. The Russian Government provided nearly 327 billion roubles (about US$10 billion) for the total development, expansion and hosting of the Games.192 billion roubles coming from the federal budget and 7 billion roubles from the Krasnodar Krai budget and from the Sochi budget. The organizers expect to have a surplus of US$300 million when the Games conclude.
Financing from non-budget sources (including private investor funds) is distributed as follows:







*Tourist infrastructure: $2.6 billion 
*Olympic venues: $500 million 
*Transport infrastructure: $270 million
* Power supply infrastructure: $100 million

Sochi 2014 Mascots

For the first time in Olympic history, a public vote was held to decide the mascots for the 2014 Winter Olympics; the 10 finalists, along with the results, were unveiled during live specials on Channel One. On 26 February 2011, the official mascots were unveiled, consisting of a polar bear, a European hare, and an Amur leopard. The initial rounds consisted of online voting among submissions, while the final round involved text messaging.

A satirical mascot known as Zoich (based on the "2014" lettering from the Sochi emblem, converted to cyrillic script), a fuzzy blue frog with hypnotic multi-coloured rings (sharing the colors of the Olympic rings) on his eyeballs and the Imperial Crown ("to remind about statehood and spirituality"), proved popular in initial rounds of online voting, and became a local internet meme among Russians (with some comparing it to Futurama's "Hypnotoad"). Despite its popularity, Zoich did not qualify for the final round of voting, with its creator, political cartoonist Egor Zhgun, claiming that organizers were refusing to respect public opinion. However, it was later revealed that the mascot was deliberately planted into the vote by organizers to help promote the online vote.

98 events over 15 disciplines in 7 sports were included in the 2014 Winter Olympics. The three skating sports disciplines are figure skating, speed skating, and short track speed skating. There are six skiing sport disciplines—alpine, cross-country skiing, freestyle, Nordic combined, ski jumping and snowboarding. The two bobsleigh sports disciplines are bobsleigh and skeleton. The other four sports are biathlon, curling, ice hockey, and luge. A total of twelve new events will be contested to make it the largest Winter Olympics to date. Numbers in parentheses indicate the number of medal events contested in each sports discipline.

LUGE

BIATHLON

Fight for Your Country The Athletes!!!

  

The Olympics are a wonderful metaphor for world cooperation, the kind of international competition that's wholesome and healthy, an interplay between countries that represents the best in all of us. 

John Williams