Don’t be too quick to judge Sochi

When I was in Sochi the year before last, I took a pleasure cruise on the Black Sea. I remember being fascinated by the city’s skyline, its cranes as striking and numerous against the snow-capped mountains as the dashes on a Fred Williams canvas.

Moscow’s independent newspapers had at that time been doing some excellent work on the preparations for Vladimir Putin’s pet project—the 2014 Winter Olympic Games, which begin tomorrow—and the toll those preparations were taking. The attention of foreign reporters was elsewhere: on the anti-Putin protests that were then underway amongst Moscow’s urban liberals and its extreme left and right groups.

Focus on these protests and their aftermath—particularly the Pussy Riot and Bolotnaya Square cases—continued at Sochi’s expense until Putin’s anti-LGBT legislation was passed last June. This legislation, which states that “propaganda of homosexualism among minors is punishable by an administrative fine,” was the first thing to really draw the West’s attention to Sochi in a major way, in large part thanks to the outrage expressed by the likes of Madonna, Lady Gaga and Stephen Fry.
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A series of revelations followed—Sochi is a hive of corruption! There are terrorists in them thar hills!—that have played into a nearly seven-month media narrative about the Games that amounts to the following: Vladimir Putin and his cronies are bigoted crooks, putting gay athletes in the cross-hairs of vigilantes and the rest in the cross-hairs of Islamist militants, and the event will almost certainly be remembered as a terrible mistake.

Read the full article at SBS News Online.