Sochi, a remote city on Russia's Black Sea coast, required a new highway and railroad to serve hundreds of thousands of guests for the 2014 Winter Olympics. These two projects alone cost as much as the entire construction budget of the 2010 Vancouver games, say event observers and activists.
"We compared the highway to similar projects in the developed world and found it to be 1.9 times what it should have cost," says Vladimir Ashurkov, executive director of one activist group, the Moscow-based Anti-Corruption Foundation. It reported in January that, based on official documents it acquired, the Sochi Olympics cost $45.8 billion. "This road-and-railway facility cost $8.7 billion and helped [Russian President Vladimir] Putin's cronies Vladimir Yakunin, Arkadiy Rotenberg and Gennadiy Timchenko to get hold of the money," Ashurkov says.