Western journalists document memorable accomodations in Sochi

[james_davis_nicoll]

The key thing about Potemkin villages is you don't let actually try to stay in one.

Comments

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

Ah, I see they're trying to give visitors the true Russian experience... :)

[sesmo.livejournal.com]

So, no toilet paper, intermittent heat, and the guy in the next room is KGB?

Ah, the good old days are here again.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

Much as we'd all like to poke fun at massive spoiled-and-entitled-rich-people cockups, I can't help but (a) feel a bit sympathetic for all the really poorly paid athletes-in-forgotten-sports from my country that are following their passion, and not getting all fat on a gravy train, and are walking into this mess, and (b) feel that the more this turns into a dog's breakfast, the less good that's going to be for international relations between Russia and we smug decadent westerners.

I don't have very much sympathy at all for media pundits pointing fingers at disaster in such a cavalier manner, nor commenters on media punditry pointing fingers at Russian commenters because "they can't even talk right". (And, yes, yes, I know, Never Read The Comments.™)

[tandw.livejournal.com]

I haven't heard much about how things are in the Olympic village compared to the hotel accommodations; are the athletes suffering through this sort of thing as well?

[mr-mediocre.livejournal.com]

The piece on NPR's All Things Considered last night implied that the athlete's village is in pretty good shape. http://www.npr.org/blogs/theedge/2014/02/04/271535281/countdown-to-sochi-will-the-city-be-ready

[tandw.livejournal.com]

That's good.

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

The biggest problem I've been told of is one that happens every Olympics: the athlete accommodations are equipped with twin-size beds. Which is a problem, because for a number of sports, the minimum entry requirement is that one is huge.

[tandw.livejournal.com]

It'd be worse for summer Olympians. Basketball, weight-lifting, the higher weight classes in boxing & wrestling....

[brett-dunbar.livejournal.com]

Byu ""twin-sized" do you mean a single bed? A twin room is one with two single beds, the room is twin, the bed isn't.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

"Twin" is a size of bed.

It's bigger than "single", smaller than "double/full" or queen or king.

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

I don't have very much sympathy at all for media pundits pointing fingers at disaster in such a cavalier manner

Would it be preferable not to point at the disaster at all? Sure, in the current clickbait media landscape, someone's going to be annoying about it, but if the alternative is preserving a dignified silence out of respect for the exploited, well, that's counterproductive.

What we're seeing is the traditional international Olympics boondoggle, plus (allegedly) even more graft than usual, minus the existing infrastructure to absorb the hit. That's worth pointing out, and a certain amount of snark is an unavoidable by-product.

[tandw.livejournal.com]

That, and if the Olympics as an institution takes a hit because of the IOC's poor choice, maybe the IOC will think harder about who to pick next time.

Also, I'd like a pony.

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

I think the IOC will be OK as long as they continue to suck less than FIFA. *cough*Qatar 2022*cough*

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

I would be fine with responsible, exposé journalism; what I'm not so fine with is "ermahgerd! poopbucket!" tweets, because I think they typically (and cynically) lower the level of discourse in the guise of "transparency".

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

For some reason I am having flashbacks to the 1976 Olympics. Cannot find the right Aislin cartoon, though.

[redbird]

what would you have them do? sit around for three days in really iffy conditions and pretend it's all well for the sake of making putin look good? it's not decadent to want to be able to wash in water that isn't labeled dangerous, or have the fire doors unlocked, and there's nothing else for them to cover until the games start except conditions in sochi.

nor are any of us required to follow the links or read the stories. would you be happier if you thought of it as "ordinary people affected by the latest mess caused by corrupt oligarchs"? putin and his cronies aren't the ones being made uncomfortable or endangered here.

[gohover.livejournal.com]

I disagree that there is nothing else to cover until the games start. For example, they could run pieces on the ethnic cleansing of the Circassians. Or they could report on the nearby modern-day conflicts. Hey, maybe the iffy hotels make a good distraction from all that.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

I'd like them to stop mistaking tweet-snark for "coverage".

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

The athletes who care so much about their personal ambitions that they're willing to take part in what is, in the best of times, a highly corrupt international competition that in this particular case is attached to an oppressive nation that within the last year has jailed homosexuals and musicians for expressing views contrary to those of the thug-in-chief.

Yeah, not feeling much sympathy for them myself.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

Oh please. That's like blaming the help for the antics of the corrupt thug host and his fat-cat dinner guests because after all, if they were servants with principles, they'd go and work in someone else's house. If you want to hold servants (or vastly underpaid athletes) responsible for the politics around the venues where they're practically forced to compete, that's your lookout, but I think that's pretty unfair.

EDIT: To be fair, I would also suspect that a great many journos are not exactly fat-cat dinner guests, either, and no doubt many are there because their bosses told them they had to, and they have about as much practical choice in the matter as the athletes do.

[glorin.livejournal.com]

This. Also, the vast majority of the athletes won't ever make it as pros or otherwise get rich and famous and they are aware of that when they choose to compete.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

That analogy doesn't even begin to make sense. Servants are an important component of a dinner party, but they aren't the reason guests come; Olympic athletes are the sole attraction of the Olympics.

A more accurate analogy would be a band who's hired to perform at a venue whose owner has a publicly stated policy of beating employees. I think most people would agree that a band should boycott such venues, especially when the owner is using the concert to bolster his own public image.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

If the venue is the only one in town, perhaps. The IOC has a de facto monopsony on 'insanely high profile international athletic events.' It's simply not an option to go down the street to a competing event of equivalent prestige; the athletes can compete in the Olympics or stay home. Athletes who wish to compete at this level have only the one venue.

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

Athletic competition is not a critical function for society, so I'm comfortable saying that not supporting corruption and oppression trumps an athlete's desire to compete at this level.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

The trouble is that not joining in this competition might remove an athletes opportunity to participate meaningfully elsewhere as well.

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

Yes, my statement covers that.

[aboutlikepleats.livejournal.com]

Kind of blipped over the difference between "a critical function for society" and "a critical function for an athlete", didn't you?

Happen I agree with you in terms of the choice I would make, me, but I have nothing at stake in this particular choice. I'm a little reluctant to so blithely if not smugly make that choice for someone else.

Y'all do what y'all want to do, though. Obviously.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

So, as long as it's the livelihood and food not coming out of your mouth, you can feel comfortable to make bold statements. That's fine for you. I'm not going to presume to demand those kinds of principles of others, but I suppose I'd applaud them when they manage to make such a stand in the face of grim circumstances.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

Also, keep in mind that many athletes in Olympic events are not there on their own; they are there because their national sports programs wants them there, through which they get funding, training support, and (some) marketing. The athletes could say no, or raise a fuss, and they'd risk getting cut from their programs, and lose all the benefits deriving therefrom. Most of them are simply not the independent operators you'd like to paint them as.

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

Well, the same goes for the reporters. They haven't been there to do sober exposés, they're there because their employing corporations expect them to generate the cynical, vulgar, intrusive sports coverage with a veneer of cheap sentimentality that their advertisers require. Tweeting their experiences as they happen, mostly from their private accounts, may not have the quiet dignity of the transparency you prefer, but to a degree, it's the transparency that's available to them, and to us. You're setting up a false dichotomy between the poor athletes and the sniggering reporters that isn't really there.

Also, if we'd prefer not to be the subject of poopbucket jokes, we should try to get the plumbing working before the guests show up.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

I think if you check up-thread, I do go some way to avoid the dichotomy. And I'd probably object to the sniggering if it came from the athletes as well, it is just that I haven't seen any.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Good point. For the reporters it's more like, "Bob, you're going to Russia. Cover the stuff on the list there, and if possible say something nice about the American athletes." A feed from their private Twitter accounts is about as unfiltered and honest as we can hope for.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

If they had "this is me in private" and "this is me at my job" twitter feeds, I'd buy that; but as long as their bosses use their twitter feeds as a means of corporate promotion (and they use these feeds as a means of self-promotion-in-a-professional-capacity to build an audience which is marketable to their bosses and other potential employers), then really, how "unfiltered and honest" is it? It's just another genre of public professional discourse, and not one I care much for, really.

[erikagillian.livejournal.com]

"I, I, I, I, ain't gonna play Sun City..."

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

Much of the finger-pointing is done on social media like Twitter, where the goal is to get eyeballs looking at you, nothing more. The people in comments complaining about all the reporters' stories are conflating tweets with articles.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

I agree wholeheartedly. What irks me is that I think some of the journos tweeting are also conflating tweets with coverage. Perhaps I'm wrong.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

That's no worse than places I've stayed in Romania or Ukraine or St Petersburg; being encouraged not to flush toilet paper is routine in quite a lot of the world, and I've stayed in several hotels where the water comes out of the tap brown and you just don't use it. If they're paying Manhattan-5*-hotel prices for it, it's understandable that they might be cross, but much of the reporting strikes me as people who've not encountered a foreign hotel before.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

I rather expect that the "olympic experience" is in catering to the entire (Western) world in a fashion that keeps them in the manner to which they've become accustomed. But that could be so cynical as to just not be the case.

What I find rather interesting about this whole mess is I don't quite remember the same level of loathing and public outrage being flung around when the summer olympics were held in China. But perhaps the level was this high or higher, it just wasn't as visible to me personally for one reason or another.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

China is, famously, competent; and the China Olympics were an enormous domestic event as well as a window for the West. I stayed in generic cheap-ish hotels in China in 2010, and they were vastly better than anywhere post-Soviet that I'd been - rather better than generic cheap-ish hotels in generally-much-richer Taiwan five years earlier - and nothing like as bad as the Sochi reports.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

That certainly may be; I was more pointing out that China has certainly presented plenty of opportunity for Western socio-political outrage, and for some reason, the fuss now seems louder. A well deserved fuss in many cases, granted, but nonetheless.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Try "not encountered a former Soviet-bloc hotel before". The toilet-paper rule is found worldwide, "light fixtures fall from the ceiling in the middle of the night" is not, nor is "opened door to find construction workers napping in bed".

There is a distinction between "bring your own toilet paper" and "the lobby is choked with construction debris". Not to mention the lulu of a story that came out of a press conference today (multiple witnesses). Paraphrasing from memory:

Russian official: We know that the reporters are deliberately sabotaging their rooms. We have security video of them pointing the shower head at the wall, turning the shower on, and leaving the room.

PR representative, brightly: Let's go tour the media center!

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

A cite.

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

Yowza.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

When showers are made criminal, only criminals will have showers.