Sochi Scene - Olympic Park Jewels Amid the Muck

(ATR) With the warmth of the sun and cooling breeze from the Black Sea, Sochi 2014 organizers struck gold with the timing of Tuesday’s tour for visiting media of the Olympic Park being built on the shoreline. A tour of mountain venues held Wednesday was soaked by continuous rain.

The tours are part of the World Press Briefing, organized by Sochi 2014 to bring 300 of the world’s press up to speed on preparations for the upcoming Games.

The Olympic Park on the coast marks the first time in the Olympic Winter Games that venues for each of the ice sports are located in one place, as well as the stadium for the ceremonies and the Main Media Center.

In the park are hotels for the IOC and Olympic Family, while the Olympic Village is at one end of the precinct and housing for the media is just minutes away at the other side of the park.

While the venues themselves are verging on completion, the surroundings throughout the park are forbidding. Roads have yet to be laid and the dirt track used by the tour buses is rutted and narrow, trucks and other construction vehicles claiming their share of the pathway. This the same roadway that is supposed to host a Formula One race in 2014. It seems more suited to the Dakar rally.

There’s dust, mud, piles of dirt and rubble. Empty trenches wait to be filled. Debris litters the site. With 15 months to the Games, it seems to an uneducated observer that it would take 30 months to clean this site to the sparkling perfection expected when the Olympics arrive.

As for the venues themselves, six of them were visited on this media tour, though the doors were only open at three. But amid the discouraging chaos of the entire site, the nearly finished venues help convince that order is coming.

The Iceberg Skating Palace, 12,000 seat venue for short track and figure skating, must be ready for competition in a few weeks, hosting a figure skating test event in December. The ice sheet is in place, the scoreboard was alight and the hall was abuzz with the sounds of last-minute work. About 100 Panasonic flats screens were stacked in their crates in one room ready to be installed.

The venue is one of two temporary venues in the park, slated to be dismantled and shipped off to another Russian city after the Games.

At the Adler Arena nearby, the first layers of water were being applied to the oval to create ice at the 8,000-seat venue for speedskating. Set to become an exhibition hall for trade shows, the test for the venue comes in April.

The Bolshoy Ice Dome is perhaps the most distinctive venue at the park, its white roof gleaming in the sun. Test event for the venue for men’s ice hockey is in December, so it is close to completion, though rough spots remain. Walkways and grass at the edge of the dome give it a finished look while steamrollers smooth the road bed ahead of paving.

The 12,000 seat hall becomes an entertainment venue post-Games.

The Shayba Arena, location for women’s ice hockey, lies a few minutes walk away from the Bolshoy Dome. The name means "puck" in Russian, and its exterior is supposed to resemble one spinning. Seating 7,000 the arena is to be demounted and shipped elsewhere in Russia after the Games. Test events are set for April and May. Still plenty of finishing work inside, but it looks like an Olympic venue coming to shape.

Seen, but not touched on the venue tour were the Main Media Center, Ice Cube Curling Arena and Fisht Olympic Stadium, all except the curling venue under intense construction.

The media center looks massive. It will also house the International Broadcast Center, but there will be more space than Sochi 2014 needs for the media. The soaring dozen story building is supposed to become a shopping center after the Games. Sochi media staff will move in next June.

The Fisht Olympic Stadium is the most unfinished of the Sochi Park venues. We could only drive by the 40,000-seat venue, cranes hovering above, dangling with giant pieces of the roof. The insides of the stadium are stuffed with scaffolding to the roof line. The stadium is now earmarked as one of the venues for the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Fisht will host opening and closing ceremonies in 2014.

Controversially, the park has meant the relocation of households on the site, which has been stripped of nearly all vestiges of the meager seaside settlement that existed before. Still remaining is the cemetery, an oasis of trees 100m square or so amid the muddy park. Our tour guide says relatives of the dozens of souls buried there have free access to the graves and crypts – including during the Games.

Written and reported in Sochi by Ed Hula

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