SOCHI, February 16 (Alexey Eremenko, RIA Novosti) – Sochi feels for all the world like a giant blind date. And it’s going pretty well, all things considered.
Few visitors quite knew what to expect, and many seem pleasantly surprised.
More than halfway into the Winter Games, the city is doing its best to live up to the Olympic mood and show its best face.
Motley banners cover every inch of the city, volunteers abound, and an Olympic-themed human-sized glove is loitering on the steps of the Stalin-era sea port to thrill and terrify children.
Olympic venues are grouped into a sea cluster and a mountain cluster – the former located in the town of Adler, 20 kilometers east of Sochi proper, and the latter a further 50-minute train trip plus ski lift ride into the mountains.
So back at the city, there are live sites providing relayed open-air broadcasts from the venues, interspersed with sing and dance performances, mostly by child ensembles. The metal detectors at the entrance points are a reminder of the security concerns that dampened the mood ahead of the Games.
Proud bearers of Olympic spectator passes are as common in the streets as ducks are in the Sochi harbor, restaurant patrons forget about food as they watch ice skaters slip and fall on the television, and unsteady teenage shouts of “Russia” waft across the waterfront after dark.
Still, the vibe in Sochi still lacks certain element of adrenaline, and the people milling in the streets fall short of what might be expected of a real sports festival.
For a taste of geniune excitement, you need to hit the mountain slopes or Adler’s Olympic park, where face-painted Danes roam and jubilant Russians waved national flags with names of their homesteads – Sakhalin, Tagil, Amur – outside the Bolshoi Ice Dome after the Russian ice hockey team’s triumphant debut game against Slovenia on Thursday (5:2).
Many Sochi residents themselves are playing cool over the Games.
“I keep on telling myself I will go see some competition. Maybe that’ll happen,” said Olga, a city administration employee.
Legacy is a recurring theme of any Olympic Games in recent times, and there is every sign much that is worthwhile has been done to Sochi.
Once a scrappy and much-loved Soviet holiday resort, the city degraded inexorably like so many provincial Russian town into a dismal backwater of rundown housing, congested traffic and surly service.
The city now packs a marina now, and while it lacks yachts – not for long, says the City Hall – there are already four cruise liners moored on the spot. That might be an ordinary sight in the Caribbean or the Mediterranean, but an exotic break from the past here.
On the shore, high-rises loom over squeaky clean streets lined with expensive shops, new malls and European-style eateries – a far cry from the previously typical dim convenience stores and Turkish and faux-Caucasian cafes patronized by black-clad, golden-toothed, foul-mouthed, working-class clientele.
In the shade of palm trees, people amble along freshly built pedestrian zones.
Traffic is actually moving, not crawling, and the city boasts infrastructure for the disabled that appears much more efficient than in Moscow.
But most importantly, the people in the streets are smiling and relaxed. Not all, but again, this is a marked improvement for Sochi, where local authorities had to hold special politeness lessons for citizens ahead of the Olympics.
“Okay, okay, it got better now. It was worth the [seven-year] wait,” said Sergei, a refugee of the Georgian-Abkhazian war of 1992 who spent the last two decades working in Sochi’s transportation industry.
Drawbacks remain – traffic lights are off on certain major roads, and the occasional golden-toothed man in sweatpants can still be encountered spewing profanities on the boulevard, neglecting picture-perfect babies swarming around him.
But Olympic Sochi still looks like a fairly typical Western city, barring a touch of local color.
And while it may not seem much for a foreign visitor, and underwhelming for the heart of a top sporting event, it is a far cry from many Russian provincial cities, and a definite – if perhaps temporary – upgrade of the city’s former grumpy, ill-mannered self. That change that was, after all, among the leading reasons for hosting the Games in the city.
Jocelyne, a French crew member from one of the liners moored of the shore, says she might be tempted to visit more towns in Russia, as ringing an endorsement as organizers could have hoped for.
“I like the scenery, the mall, the park,” she said. “I was a bit skeptical at first … but it's very nice.”
Updates with correct dateline.
