History repeats itself. As quickly as cities rise up to host the Olympics, they seem to fall even faster. We’ve seen it in Athens, Beijing and London and now in Sochi, Russia.
This is Sochi now, six months after the completion of the 2014 Winter Olympics.
Rosa Khutor, which was one of the main hubs of the 2014 Sochi
Olympics, is “completely empty” six months
after the games, according Russian
photographer Alexander Belenkiy.
Belenkiy called the town “lifeless” in a post on his Live Journal
blog. He said the shops, restaurants,
and hotels were operating at 5% capacity and that he encountered only a handful
of tourists on the streets.
The Sochi Olympics cost $51
billion. A good chunk of that went
toward building the mountain cluster. The Russian government spent $8.7 billion
on a 31-mile road and
railway system to connect Krasnaya
Polyana to the coastal neighborhood of Adler. Another $2 billion was
spentto build the Rosa Khutor ski
resort.