Anyone can slip

Sochi presented his application book on lumpy ice

Still dreaming of winning the 2014 Winter Games, the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi yesterday solemnly held a ceremony to send its bid book to the International Olympic Committee. Since there are no Olympic-scale facilities in the city yet, the ceremony was held at the stadium of the city gymnasium No. 8, where yesterday the artificial skating rink was filled and frozen. It is impossible to say that everything went smoothly. In the sense that the ice turned out to be lumpy and not at all slippery, and the invited figure skating stars, Olympic champions Tatyana Totmyanina and Maxim Marinin managed to skate with difficulty several tens of meters that separated them from the general director of the Sochi 2014 bid committee Dmitry Chernyshenko and the mayor Sochi by Victor Kolodyazhny. Nevertheless, three voluminous volumes were handed to the athletes and allowed to be demonstrated to journalists. After which Mr. Chernyshenko took the “dream book” back - it must arrive at the IOC headquarters in Lausanne by January 10, 2007, along with applications from the South Korean city of Pyeongchang and the Austrian Salzburg.

As Toto Darch, director of event organization for the Sochi 2014 bid committee, later admitted to Vremya Novostey, in fact, the skating rink will not be put into operation until mid-January. But the organizers had no choice - it would have looked strange if the book was handed to the skaters under a spreading green palm tree. Nevertheless, the skating rink for Sochi is still truly exotic. There has never been anything like this at the resort. Under the awning there is a platform 40 by 20 meters. According to the assurances of the staff of the Sochi 2014 bid committee, through whose efforts this structure was created, it will be possible to skate here even when the air outside warms up to plus 35 degrees.

However, the 500-page application book, naturally, is not about this skating rink at all. It sets out in detail the concept of holding the Olympics in Sochi. Similar books will be presented to the IOC in Pyeongchang and Salzburg, and members of the International Olympic Committee will make a choice based on their impressions of studying these books (the capital of the 2014 Olympics, as already reported, will be determined in July 2007 at the IOC session in Guatemala).

The second main document for IOC members will be the conclusions of the evaluation commission of 19 IOC experts. In February 2007, this commission will visit all three candidate cities. First Pyeongchang, then Sochi, and lastly Salzburg. It is already known that experts will be in Sochi from February 19 to 23. The visit of IOC experts will be a more complex problem for Sochi than preparing an application book: the Russian candidate differs from its competitors in that, apart from a declaration of its intentions, empty sites and structures drawn on paper, it has nothing to show the evaluators yet. It is clear that the skating rink at the gymnasium stadium is not an Olympic facility at all. True, as it became known this week, during the inspection of the city by the IOC commission, Sochi residents will receive the highest level of support: Vladimir Putin will fly to the resort to meet with members of the commission. This was announced by the President of the Russian Olympic Committee Leonid Tyagachev.

The possibility of a meeting between the head of state and inspectors of the International Olympic Committee is permitted by both the Olympic Charter and the IOC Code of Ethics. When it became known that the evaluation commission would fly from Pyeongchang to Sochi without a transfer in Moscow, Mr. Tyagachev and the Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian government, the chairman of the organizing committee to support the nomination of Sochi as a candidate for the 2014 Olympics, Alexander Zhukov, turned to Vladimir Putin with a request to “be February 20-23 in Sochi." According to the President of the Russian ROC Leonid Tyagachev, the head of state agreed “because he understands the importance of the official reception of the IOC evaluation commission.”

In the meantime, in Sochi they are doing everything possible so as not to lose face in front of the evaluation commission. For example, the staff of the application committee managed to get photographs of ten of the nineteen experts planning to come to Sochi. The mayor of the resort, Viktor Kolodyazhny, gathered all the local restaurateurs and informed them that the IOC experts would certainly visit some restaurants, but which ones they would not warn in advance, so all meeting participants were shown portraits of the commission members and were strongly recommended to reproduce the photos and remember these faces.

Igor GLANIN, Sochi