The most expensive Olympic Games will take place not in the world’s richest country. While the majority of developed countries urge their citizens to reduce their spending to cope with the outcomes of the global financial crisis, Russia spends billions to show off. The country’s government, where the vast majority lives beyond the poverty line and people raise money to treat the ill using social networks due to lack in social programs, decided to arrange a feast in time of plague. 214 billion rubles will be allocated for preparation for the Olympic Games in Sochi; even more will be spend on the infrastructure. ‘We did it deliberately to make the southern part of the Russian Federation a more attractive and comfortable place not only during the Olympic Games but for the decades after it," Vladimir Putin said. Russia’s president is for some reason sure that the Russians will stop travelling to ‘Turkey, Europe, Italy and so on’ and despite the soaring prices and low-level service start ‘spending money in Sochi.’ And there is worthy reason for that; hundreds of kilometers of new roads, tens of bridges and tunnels, railway from seashore to the mountain area were built; a new medical center as well as 43 hotels with tens of hundreds up-to-date rooms were constructed.
In comparison with the 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi, the cost of the Salt Lake City 2002 Winter Olympic Games was $1.9 billion, in Beijing 2008, $42 billion, in London 2012, $24 billion and in Sochi 2014, $70 billion. It should be noted that the organization of the winter Olympic Games was usually cheaper than that of summer ones.