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Summer resort Sochi hopes to host Winter Olympics

An elderly woman sits by the Black Sea in the Russian southern resort city of Sochi on Dec. 18 last year. Sochi is bidding to host the 2014 Winter Olympic Games. PHOTO: AFP

It has a single ski-lift and is better known for summer bathing, but the southwest Russian city of Sochi is hoping to beat off competition from winter resorts in Austria and South Korea to host the Winter Olympics in 2014.

"We're building a new city," said Yefim Bitenyov from the Sochi 2014 bid committee in an interview in a restaurant on the palm-fringed shores of the Black Sea.

Sochi was developed in the 1920s in former malaria-ridden swamps on the western end of the Caucasus mountains as a sea resort with lavish sanatoriums for the Soviet working class and the Communist Party elite.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the city became a reputed smuggling hub and hangout for the Russian mafia.

Now, Sochi is a popular destination for Moscow elites and holiday home condos are sprouting around town.

The only winter resort here is Krasnaya Polyana, which has one ski-lift run, some 900m up in the Caucasus mountains and about an hour's drive from the center of the city.

Other planned Olympic venues are so far only on paper or under construction. The city is also close to a series of conflict areas, most notably the Russian province of Chechnya and Abkhazia, a breakaway Georgian territory.

But the Sochi bid is a prestige project that has received backing from President Vladimir Putin and the government has signed off on US$12 billion to develop the city's infrastructure.

Kremlin-friendly firms are also involved. The state gas monopoly Gazprom and metals holding Interros are building two new luxury resorts in the mountains and Oleg Deripaska, head of aluminium giant Rusal, is developing a new airport.

The International Olympic Committee is set to visit Sochi next month and a final decision on who will host the 2014 Olympics is to be made in July. Sochi is running against Salzburg in Austria and Pyeongchang in South Korea.

Environmental groups such as Greenpeace and WWF warn, however, that Sochi's Olympic ambitions could ruin pristine areas of the Caucasus and say that organizers are bending the law to ease planned construction.

"The people of Sochi are in shock ... It's frightening to think what will happen," said Nadezhda Didenko, a geologist and chief secretary at the Sochi section of the Russian Geographical Society.

"Our national park is working in the interests of the Olympics and they're changing the zoning. They're not free, they're just told what to do," Didenko said.
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