Question:
Discuss About The A Year Before Actual Game Commencement?
History of Olympic can be traced back to 777 BC, when the games were played on the plains of Olympia and dedicated to Olympian gods. Winter Olympic 2014 were held in Russia from 7th till 23rd February. The event in itself was special as it was the first time Olympic was happening in Russia after separation from Soviet Union in 1991. A total of 98 events took place in 7 sports and 15 disciplines and for the first time a public vote was taken to decide the mascot (Polar bear, snow hare & a snow leopard). The game has gone down in the history as the most expensive sporting event with an expenditure of $51 Bn. This essay will focus and investigate on the formation, planning & the growth stage of Sochi winter Olympics 2014.
It can be understood as the ability to identify, track, and take certain action on an event at the right time and in the right sequence. Planning, Execution & control form the back bone of event life cycle. The event has to be seen in 3 phases to understand the responsibilities in a coherent manner, the stages are: Before the event, during the event & after the event. In the light of this theory let’s understand the formation, growth and staging of the Sochi winter Olympics
Bidding: Russia has not hosted Olympic Games since 1980 and was preparing itself to participate in 2014 winter Olympics, on July 4 2007, IOC committee choose Sochi (Russia) over 6 other countries, defending Austria & South Korea in the process. Organisers wanted Sochi olymics to be the greenest and most environmentally aware games to be staged; the responsibility was taken by the event organizing committee in absolute unison (Forbes, 2016).
Infrastructure creation: Special infrastructures were created to accommodate the winter Olympics at it was the first time in the history of olympic that players had to play in high temperature. Olympic park had to be constructed, construction was started in the year 2007 and most of the venues and related infra was created before 2013 by state of the art architecture.
Mascot: Mascots are privy to any Olympic game, a lot of thought process goes into selecting a particular mascot, and in the history of Olympic it was first time that the mascot was selected through online polling, paving the way for snow hare, snow leopard & polar bear.
Growth stage of the event: It is the stage where the event has been formed and now has entered into the growth stage or can be understood as during the event stage in event lifecycle.
Invitation: It is customary that the event invitations are to be sent by post from IOC headquarters. A year before the actual game commencement, during an event, President of Olympic committee sent out personal notes to all the participating countires and fellow athletes.
Cultural Celebration: As mentioned earlier, opening ceremony or the kick start of Olympic has to be phenomenal, in 2014. The theme of the ceremony was Russian history and arts, which also included traditional ballet, classical dance, Russian revolution etc (Youtube, 2014)
Budgeting: The original budget for the event was US $12Bn which was further elevated to 50Bn, inflating the budget by 400%, making it the costliest Olympic game (Business Insider, 2014)
Sponsers: Success of any event is based on the sponsers associated with it, this is kind of win-win situation for the event organisers and the sponsers , as event organisers get money from sponsers and the sponsers in turn get an opportunity to advertise their product/brand/services in OLYMPIC. Some of the main title sponsers and partners were: Samsung, VISA, GE, coca cola were some of the big names among dozen of others (Sponsers, 2014)
Power & Transport Infrastructure: To accommodate the games, a five year strategy to generate more power was proposed in the year 2009 by Russian energy experts, according to the said strategy the power capacity for the venues would be increased by 2.5 times of the present capacity, ensuring a smooth run during the event. In the bid Sochi built 49 major electric projects and increased the energy capacity by 800 %( National Geographic, 2014). To further improve the infrastructure of Sochi, the govt built more than 360 Km of road, 321 km of railroad and 22 tunnels, thus showcasing their strength in modernisation of transport facilities.Certain funds were also spent on construction of hotels and on sewage treatment plan (Olympic news, 2014).
The embelem for winter Olympics 2014 was unveiled in Dec 2009; the organisers carefully selected a futuristic and minimalistic design where they can place both Sochi and 2014 facing each other. The game’s official slogan HOT.COOL.YOURS was unveiled in Dec 2012; the slogan represented the passion and heated competition among the atheletes, the hot climate of Sochi and a feeling of belonging & inclusion (CNN News, 2017)
Opening Ceremony: It was a colourful celebration of Russian heritage, history, arts & its culture, which was witnessed by more than .4 Mn people. For the ceremony alone 37000 police officers were recruited to take control of the security and keep and help in keeping peace all around the city and prevent any criminal activities during the ceremony (CNN, 2014)
The torch was lit off by Russian president Mr. Vladimir Putin, post which the torch bearers relayed across 65000Km covering 83 regions of Russia in a span of 123 days. This is touted to be the longest relay in the history of Olympics (Bleach Report, 2014)
A total of 88 nations participated in the event with more than thousands of athletes proving their strength in the sports arena.
As discussed earlier , total of 98 events , spanning over 15 disciplines in 7 sports were held at 2014 winter Olympics, some of them were: alpine, skiing,snow-boarding,curling, ice-hockey, luge etc.
The design is intended to resemble sochi’s landscape and was unveiled in May 2013, Russia, Canada, Norway & US were the top four countries with highest number of medals with a count of 33, 26,25 & 28 respectively(ESPN, 2014).
It is one of the most important part of any sporting event , and with Olympic at the centre stage, the stakes were really high, hence the domestic broadcasting rights were sold by sportfive to the market leader channel one ,NTV plus & VGTRK, this helped the organisers earn a lot of money. At the same time adveritisers tied up with the broadcasters and used the platform to do trial for their 4k HDTV
A lot has been already said about the amount of money spent on this extravaganza event, having said that, there are a few things which should be kept in mind with respect to the stakeholders before organising the event:
As mentioned earlier, the budget allocated for the winter Olympics was supposed to be $12 bn, which rose to $51bn, almost 400 % rise in the budget, shows carelessness on the part of organisers and also points out at corruption in the system. Efforts should be made that a committee should be formed independent of the organising committee, keeping a tab on the expenses and raise an alarm to the committee if the expense head is going over the budget, accordingly take necessary action to prevent the same.
Olympic park was specially buit for the event, causing millions of dollars to the committee. Post event usage of the park was not thought of, resulting in waste of the infrastructure created, hence, post usage of the park/ground/stadium should be thought of before spending a lot of money, also it makes sense for the stakeholders.
Winter Olympics 2014 is the most controversial Olympic in the history of events, and one of the primary reason of the same is selection of Sochi as the venue. A lot of controversies were in and around the sochi city, the primary one being, sochi being of great importance to circassian people, who suffered genocide at the hands of Russian army, hence conducting games of such a large stature was considered insensitive.All such incidents has to be well thought of before choosing the city in order to keep the spirit of game alive and the place filled with positivity.
References
Bleach Report, 2014, ‘Olympic Torch Relay 2014: Full Route for Historic Flame’s Journey to Sochi’, https://bleacherreport.com/articles/1801703-olympic-torch-relay-2014-full-route-for-historic-flames-journey-to-sochi, viewed on 10 September, 2017.
Business Insider, 2014, ‘Why Sochi is by far the most expensive Olympics ever’, https://www.businessinsider.in/Why-Sochi-Is-By-Far-The-Most-Expensive-Olympics-Ever/articleshow/28977834.cms, viewed on 10 September, 2017.
CNN News, 2017, ‘2014 Sochi winter Olympics fast facts’, https://edition.cnn.com/2013/10/14/world/2014-sochi-winter-olympics-fast-facts/index.html, viewed on 10 September, 2017.
CNN, 2014, ‘Sochi 2014 begins with teams, classical music and a flying girl’, https://edition.cnn.com/2014/02/07/world/europe/russia-sochi-winter-olympics/index.html, viewed on 10 September, 2017.
ESPN, 2014, ‘Medal Tracker’, https://www.espn.com/olympics/winter/2014/medals, viewed on 10 September, 2017.
Forbes, 2016, ‘Recent concerns over the Olympic bidding process are not justified’, https://www.forbes.com/sites/leighsteinberg/2016/09/13/recent-concerns-over-the-olympic-bidding-process-are-not-justified/#4f3afd81124c, viewed on 10 September, 2017.
National Geographic, 2014, ‘Sochi Powers Up: Bringing Energy to Site an Olympic Feat’, https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2014/02/140207-sochi-olympics-energy-projects/, viewed on 10 September, 2017.
Olympic News, 2014, ‘SOCHI’S NEW TRANSPORT NETWORK KEEPING THE GAMES RUNNING’, https://www.olympic.org/news/sochi-s-new-transport-network-keeping-the-games-running, viewed on 10 September, 2017.
Olympic, 2017, ’Organizing committee for the Olympic Games’, https://www.olympic.org/ioc-governance-organising-committees, viewed on 9 September, 2017.
Sponsorship, 2014, ‘Sochi 2014 Olympic Sponsorships’, https://www.sponsorship.com/Latest-Thinking/Sochi-2014-Olympic-Sponsorship-Insights.aspx, viewed on 10 September, 2017.
The Guardian, 2013, ‘Russia to monitor all communications at winter Olympics in Sochi’, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/06/russia-monitor-communications-sochi-winter-olympics, viewed on 10 September, 2017.
YouTube, 2014, ‘The complete Sochi 2014 opening ceremony’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKhuvril8Rs, viewed on 10 September, 2017.
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