Why Putin could not care less about bad publicity over Sochi

Who knows at this stage what these Winter Olympics will be remembered for.

Will it be a spectacular game of ice hockey between Russia and Canada? The medal count? Russia’s treatment of gays? The bombast of Vladimir Putin? A Chechen terrorist outrage? Or the fact that many of the toilets in the purpose built media hotels don’t flush?

As the world homes in on Russia at sporting prime time, everyone is hoping to get some kind of story out of these games. There will be surprises both pleasant and unpleasant.

For many observers outside Russia, the preamble has long been written. This is the most expensive sporting event ever. It has cost $50bn, three times as much as the London Olympics, more than all the Winter Olympics combined since 1926.

We may scoff at the cost. A similar overspend in London would have put Boris in the stocks. But in a Russia where the elite is flush with oil money, it would have been considered churlish to spend less than the most.

I still chuckle at the fact that in a country where snow is notoriously conspicuous by its abundance in winter, Vladimir Putin has chosen the one resort where it is conspicuous by its absence. Imagine Barack Obama choosing Florida to host the Winter Olympics.

But then these Olympics are a vintage vanity project for the former spy who likes to take his shirt off in public. Their cost, their praetorian security, their defiance of Mother Nature, all point to spectacular hubris.

Every Olympic Games runs this risk as the host nation tries to show off its best side to the rest of the world. China used the Beijing Olympics to dazzle us with a show that went well beyond the abstract superlatives of mass production. We obliged with dropping jaws.

London turned Britain’s multiculturalism and humor into a festival of gentle self-mockery, and then piled on a mountain of medals and national pride. We surprised ourselves and the rest of the world.

The Barcelona Olympics, the first of the post cold war era, showed us that a former fascist dictatorship can turn an opening ceremony into a tasteful cabaret. Spain’s creativity – squashed, jailed or exiled for decades – came back to be on full display. It was marvellous.

So every Olympics Games ends up serving a purpose. Mention the name Munich and all people can think of is tragedy. Berlin 1936 is Hitler showing off his racial madness and square-jawed architecture to the rest of the world. If only he had stuck to sports.

So the Sochi Olympics may well be remembered as the Putin Games, put on by a man whose mission is to restore Russia’s eternally bruised pride and diminished greatness.

Western journalists like to add that Sochi also happened to be Stalin’s favorite resort. Here it is used as an insult. In Russia it might be seen as a bit of a compliment.

The performance-enhancing architecture of Sochi reminds me of Peter the Great’s grandiose creation of the capital in his own name on the banks of the Neva river. St Petersburg was made to look like a new classical metropolis, a Florence on steroids, whose purpose was to open Russia to the west and prove that a Russian tsar can beat the princes of Paris and Berlin at their own game.

I am sure Vladimir Putin is no longer vexed by the half-hearted boycott of some western leaders. He couldn’t care less about the outrage over his anti-gay policies. That stuff is very popular in Russia itself. He will convince himself that this is a great moment for mother Russia, a glorious return to the world stage.

And his people will surely agree with him – but only if the Russian ice hockey team exorcise the shame of Vancouver 2010 and win gold. But even all the fake snow of Sochi can’t conjure up such a medal. Let the games begin!

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