 |
| Recommended reading: Travis Ganong's blog posts about the trip to Sochi |
The men's and women's World Cup tours finished a swing through Sochi, Russia at the Rosa Khutor ski area recently, successfully testing the 2014 Olympic site's ability to pull off a big time alpine event. The place does look pretty amazing, as you can see here on Travis Ganong's blog and on Tommy Eckfeldt's Facebook album. You can also see the resort in its more traditional Joey/Jerry/Gomer/Gaper livery here. Looks nice.
But Russia is generally kind of a weird place, and Sochi is no exception. In 2007, there was no resort. So they hired Roger McCarthy away from Vail Resorts to come to Sochi and build a Utopian ski resort right from the box. Some assembly required. Batteries not included. And so we are now presented with Vail 2.0, in which I-70 is removed from the landscape, the buildings become emptier, Norwegian XC skiers get detained, and the government uses the Russian equivalent of eminent domain (compensation not included) quite liberally. So liberally, in fact, that McCarthy left the project in 2008 after some "land ownership issues" came up.
Whether he left because the locals ran him out of town after he helped the government seize and smash their houses, or because he objected to the the government's seize/smash actions is unclear from what we can find on the Internet. But anyway, a lot of the locals were/are pretty pissed at how the whole thing went down, as you might imagine. I wouldn't worry too much about it though, the Russian government has ways of dealing with these sorts of things.
Back to the story. Vail:
Sochi:
Since Rosa Khutor is only 40 clicks from the ocean, the sushi in Sochi is just that much fresher, too. The Downhill track looks legitimately awesome, and with any luck they'll find enough bodies to fill the hotels and restaurants for the big two weeks in 2014. The organizers expect to make about $300 million off the Winter Olympics, and isn't that what the spirit of the games is all about? Can't wait to see if these guys can pull it off. Our money's on Russia coming through in style.
-
No comments:
Post a Comment