Few people know that the Sochi Olympics are being held near a Unesco biosphere reserve. For this reason, the construction work has sparked protests from scientists and environmental activists.
On 7 February, the twenty-second Winter Olympics begin in Sochi, a city in southern Russia in the Krasnodar region, on the Black Sea. Some 2,600 athletes from 87 nations will take part in the Games.
Sochi is just a few kilometres from major ski resorts and only 50 kilometres south of the western Caucasus, an area protected by Unesco as a designated world heritage site and biosphere reserve, being the only European mountain range to have remained untouched by human activity.
How much money has been spent
Since the Russian city was chosen in July 2007 to host the 2014 Olympic Games, the Moscow government has spent 51 billion dollars, approximately 38 billion euros, breaking the record of 40 billion dollars held by China for staging the 2008 Summer Olympics. When the cost of each individual event is analysed, the comparison becomes even more striking. At Beijing in 2008, 302 events were held at a cost of 132 million dollars per event. At Sochi there will be 98 events, that is 520 million dollars per event.
The majority of public money has been spent on building the road and railway linking Adler, on the Black Sea, to Krasnaya Polyana, the resort that will host the skiing and snowboard competitions. This major infrastructure project alone — the purpose of which is to halve journey times between the two locations — has cost 8.7 billion dollars, almost as much as the previous Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada, where a total of 9.2 billion dollars was spent.
An edition that is unsustainable for the environment too
The unsustainability of this year's Games does not appear to be merely financial. According to an investigation entitled The Sochi Olympics are a five-ring mess by McKenzie Funk, published in the American magazine Outside (translated into Italian by Internazionale in issue 1033), the construction work has also sparked fierce protests from an environmental standpoint.
The first to oppose the Olympics were the 226 members of the Russian Geographical Society (Sgr). Founded in 1845, the Sgr is Russia's oldest independent scientific agency, and its Sochi branch is one of the most important owing to the exceptionally high level of biodiversity found in the area.
According to Funk's report, the scientists' opposition came to a head when the construction company encountered a block of Soviet-era limestone caves during the drilling of a railway tunnel. From that point on, the Sochi branch of the Sgr consistently opposed the construction of the roads, the railway and all the sporting facilities — ski lifts, stadiums and barriers — that would shortly go on to alter the habitat of the nature reserve.
Protests heard by Unesco
The Environmental Watch on the North Caucasus is an environmental organisation that has been carrying out annual inspections of the Games sites since 2007 and has been fighting ever since to halt projects that are harmful to the environment. The organisation has described the Olympics as a threat to the ecosystem, and to that end has enlisted Unesco to stop or reroute bulldozers and loggers whenever necessary, to prevent the western Caucasus from ending up on the list of world heritage sites at risk.
The landscape that Funk describes in his article as he recounts his journey through the construction sites makes it abundantly clear what is at stake: "The banks are strewn with plastic bottles, rubble and stacks of timber. Next to a portable toilet stand two signs, one in Russian and one in English, describing that apocalyptic scene as the 'Imereti Lowlands Natural Ornithological Park'. 'Throughout the entire territory of the park,' the signs read, 'it is prohibited to carry out activities that may alter the natural landscape.' Hunting, damaging bird breeding grounds, collecting wild plants, polluting the water or harming 'the aesthetic and recreational environmental quality of the park' are all forbidden." To say nothing of the waste and debris from the railway construction which, according to Funk, is being dumped in illegal landfill sites close to the coastal zone.
What will happen after the Olympics
For now, neither the Sgr scientists nor the Environmental Watch activists have faced reprisals or censorship from the Russian security services or the government for having reported the environmental damage suffered by one of the most beautiful and unspoilt areas in the world. The approach seems to be the lenient one applied to the Greenpeace activists who were released after the Russian parliament voted for an amnesty on the initiative of President Vladimir Putin, or to the Pussy Riot, freed on 23 December 2013.
The hope is that this approach will not be overturned once the Olympic Games are over, when the attention of the media and the international community will fade, leaving behind a permanently altered habitat and creating the conditions for a resumption of human rights violations.