Will the Sochi Olympics Be a Massive Shitstorm? Possibly a Literal One?

The Washington Post is
getting lots of page views and shares of a piece they put together
yesterday afternoon aggregating reporters arriving to cover the
Sochi Olympics only to discover their quarters are
not exactly ready.

What starts as a list of simple, not unusual problems for venues
just finishing up – rooms not ready, fallen curtains, et cetera –
quickly descends into a hilarious parade of horribles – no
electricity, no water, no doors, no heat, no lobby, no
floor. The
most expensive Olympics in history, ladies and gentlemen!

Over at
Grantland, Katie Baker reports on the scene on some of her own
experiences, as well as stories that she’s heard:

I had yet to eat my breakfast this morning when someone regaled
me with a story about a guy staying up in Sochi’s mountaintop media
hotel cluster who turned on his faucet and watched as sewage
spilled out. Last night, a colleague returned to her room after a
long day of work to find the door swung open, a set of keys still
dangling from the lock. Nothing was stolen, but a TV had finally
been installed. It could have been worse: The door to one guy’s
room was supposedly kicked down by workers trying to put in a cable
box.

The tales from the site of the 2014 Winter Olympics go on and
on: hotel reservations vanishing, shower rods and curtains nowhere
to be found, workers heaving small decorative palm trees off the
back of a moving truck and onto the side of the road like paperboys
on bicycles.

I arrived at my hotel at the same time as a friendly journalist
from Montreal, and when we got to our adjacent rooms (both
supposedly temporary until our real rooms are ready), his door
handle broke off in his hand. His first souvenir! My bathroom has
red Sharpie marks delineating where additional construction should
have gone, an unidentified device was attached high up on the wall
with masking tape, and there was no caulking. But my hot water
works, my pillow is fantastic, and I have lightbulbs, which places
me in the top percentile of accommodation privilege. Stacy
St. Clair had no water in her room and was told by a
receptionist to avoid it even if restored: “Do not use on your face
because it contains something very dangerous.” (A quick side note
on the sphinxlike front desk clerks, by the way: I am legitimately
infatuated with their unparalleled ability to deliver bad
news.)

Baker, though, suspects that once the games actually begin, much
of the complaints from journalists will die down as they focus on
the actual games. She says the actual venues are beautiful (did she
check to make sure they had floors?) and the mood there is festive.
We’ll just have to wait to see if the opening ceremonies are
interrupted by a
power outage or if those wacky double-toilets start spewing out
geysers of waste.