Translated material
Zigzag of luck
The President of Russia may take part in the Sochi 2014 Olympic bid campaign
The Sochi City Hall officially presented the updated logo for the Sochi 2014 bid campaign. The logo, approved the day before by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), was presented by the General Director of the Sochi 2014 bid committee, Dmitry Chernyshenko. According to him, the fact that the Russian resort acquired an updated logo can be considered a starting point: then everything will be “much more complicated and serious.”On June 22, the IOC included Sochi among the three candidates continuing the fight for the 2014 Winter Olympics, and the city received the right to use the main symbols of the Olympic movement - five multi-colored rings. Three fundamental changes have been made to the Sochi logo: from now on it is decorated with the Olympic rings; the inscription “Candidate city” replaced the inscription “Applicant City”; and the red zigzag stripe, symbolizing the mountain peaks of the Sochi village of Krasnaya Polyana, where the Olympic competitions are planned to be held, received a new twist. In the old logo, this stripe ran from left to right, which looked more like a graph of declining production indicators. Now the “graph” on the Sochi logo is absolutely vigorous: the zigzag tends exclusively upward.
The remaining elements of the logo remained unchanged. The same colors - white, blue and red, corresponding to the colors of the Russian flag, the same blue and white snowflake associated with winter sports, in the center of which there is a stylized five-pointed star.
At the moment, only seven cities on the planet have the right to use the Olympic rings in their symbols: these are the already named capitals of the future Summer and Winter Olympic Games - Beijing, London and Vancouver; three candidates for the right to host the 2014 Winter Olympics - Salzburg, Pyeongchang and Sochi; and finally Lausanne, where the IOC headquarters is located. Presenting the updated Sochi Olympic logo, Mr. Chernyshenko warned businessmen in the resort city that the image of the Olympic rings is prohibited from being used in commercial advertising. “We would not like our application to be examined at a meeting of the IOC ethics commission,” said the general director of the Sochi-2014 application committee. If Sochi residents start drawing Olympic rings on everything sold at the resort, their chances of holding the Olympic Games will definitely decrease...
The Russian resort, according to foreign expert companies, is still at the bottom of the list of candidates for the 2014 Winter Olympics, behind both Salzburg and Pyeongchang. And this, as Dmitry Chernyshenko noted, is a fair assessment of the indicators that were reflected in the Sochi application documents previously submitted to the IOC. But now the situation, according to Mr. Chernyshenko, is changing. The main thing is that the federal target program for the development of Sochi, adopted by the government, is already starting to work, guaranteeing the allocation of 327.2 billion rubles to the resort if Sochi wins the pre-Olympic competition. And such money, of course, will be considered by the IOC as a guarantee that all the facilities necessary for the Olympics will be built on time. Moreover, as Mr. Chernyshenko said, Sochi’s current third place is a “calibrated tactical move.” London, at the same stage of the fight for its Summer Olympics, was also third, behind Madrid and Paris, Mr. Chernyshenko recalled. And he promised that Sochi’s performance will only improve further.
The recent trip of the Sochi delegation to Vancouver, Canada, where an IOC seminar was held, which examined the successes and shortcomings of organizing the Winter Olympic Games in Turin, added to Mr. Chernyshenko's optimism. The Winter Olympics in Vancouver will take place in 2010, and there, as Sochi residents saw, the construction of the main Olympic structures and facilities is just beginning. “This means that we will have time to build everything, especially since we have twice as much time as the Canadians,” say the Sochi-2014 bid committee.
In Sochi itself, a meeting of thirty experts took place, whose track record includes experience in successful campaigns to nominate Atlanta, Athens, Sydney, and Beijing for the title of Olympic capitals. They developed a strategy for the final stage of the Sochi 2014 bid campaign. The details of this strategy are kept secret, but Dmitry Chernyshenko said that the experts liked the Russian resort and highly value its chances of winning.
In foreign media, a broad advertising campaign for Sochi as a candidate city for the right to host the 2014 Winter Olympic Games will begin in October. According to unconfirmed information, Russian President Vladimir Putin will personally take part in it. At his Bocharov Ruchey residence in Sochi, he will meet with a group of foreign journalists to tell them about Sochi and the resort's Olympic prospects.