The closing ceremony ended the Sochi games with a burst of fireworks casting a glowing light over the worldly Olympic village. At night, the Olympic village is a sea of lighted and shimmering stadiums across a vast concrete expanse. Daytime, however, reveals the true construct of the Olympic village; huge buildings, stadiums, and hotel rooms that have no clear or profitable purpose after the Sochi Games.
Russia made Olympic history with its exorbitant $51 billion investment. Russian Olympic organizers and Putin proposed that the Sochi village would serve as a resort city, but Szymanski, a Sport’s Management professor at University of Michigan, explains what actually will happen: “Building the facilities for these events creates a tremendous amount of excess capacity, particularly when it comes to hotel rooms. So what happens is that [hotel] owners get into bidding wars, and that drives prices down.” The Sochi village also has several unfinished buildings that serve as “excess capacity,” which is bound to decrease in value and price in the near future. Kimayev, an environmental activist who has condemned the overspending and wasting of natural resources on the Sochi games, claims it is imperative to work with the Russian government in order to ensure that the village buildings will be put to proper use. The region, nor the city, will be able to maintain the Sochi village due to its extremely high cost, so only the federal government will be able to maintain the village as a federal resort.
Russian officials have also proposed making the Olympic village into a Russian sports training center and moving the buildings into other major cities in Russia. The future of the Sochi Olympic village is hazy and has yet to be determined.
