Russia hopes geography and budget boost will help Sochi's 2014 Olympic bid

Russia hopes geography and budget boost will help Sochi’s 2014 Olympic bid{mosimage}MOSCOW – Russia is prepared to spend 196 billion rubles (US$6.75 billion) to develop the resort area of Sochi if it wins a bid for the 2014 Winter Olympics.

Sports Minister Vyacheslav Fetisov told a news conference to reveal the city’s bid plan that the main part of that money would come from the federal budget. He did not specify exactly how much would come from the national coffers.

Fetisov and other officials said they viewed the Games as a potential boost for the area, which is highly popular among Russian tourists but little-known internationally.

”The realization of the Olympic project in Sochi can be the locomotive of developing the whole region … today Sochi gets 2 million tourists a year, and after nine years that could grow by three times,” Fetisov said.

Serei Sukhanov, deputy head of the Sochi city administration, added that Sochi could become ”not just a Russian resort, but an international resort.”

The presentation indicated that Sochi intends to use the region’s unusual geography as a key attraction. The city is on the Black Sea shore, 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) south of Moscow, and has subtropical vegetation, but the snow-clad Caucasus Mountains soar directly to the east.

Promotional slides shown at the news conference featured views of pleasure boats in a sunny harbor with the white mass of mountains in the background.

”It’s really a unique place on Earth … none of the competing cities can offer this,” said Dmitry Chernishenko, general director of the bid committee.

The plan is to hold indoor ice events – hockey, speed skating, figure skating and curling – on flatlands around Sochi proper, with skiing, snowboarding and bobsledding centered around the nearby mountain resort of Krasnaya Polyana.

The layout would make for a compact Games. The distance from the athletes’ village to any of the venues would be no more than about six kilometers (four miles), Chenishenko said.

The road leading to the snowsports venues would be closed to private vehicles, ensuring smooth transport, and a light-rail system would be built from the airport to the snowsports area, officials said.

Sochi is one of seven cities seeking the Games. The others are Pyeongchang, South Korea; Almaty, Kazakhstan; Borjomi, Georgia; Jaca, Spain; Salzburg, Austria; and Sofia, Bulgaria.

The International Olympic Committee will name three or four of those cities as finalists in June, with the winner to be announced in July 2007.