The Winter Olympics are going to take place shortly in Sochi, and not only are they the most expensive Olympics ever, and that is not hard to say every 4 years with inflation, but they are more expensive than any Summer Olympics as well.  I read a fascinating article in BusinessWeek magazine which detailed massive corruption that has gone on in the Olympics where friends or associates of Vladimir Putin have been awarded the majority of contracts.  It appears however that, sadly like we read all to often in South Africa, you don’t win major construction contracts in Russia unless you agree to pay fees to the people either overseeing you or who have awarded you the contract.  So much has been spent on these Olympics that in fact just the cost of a brand new train that they have put in, which goes up the mountains, at a cost of $8,7 billion, exceeds the total cost of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver in 2010.  

Russian opposition parties have done research and have discovered that the cost of building this new train has cost three times more than it did for NASA to deliver the Rovers to Mars.  The total cost of the Sochi Games is going to be $51 billion which exceeds the $40 billion spent by China on the 2008 Summer Olympics, the most expensive so far.  It is fabulous extravagance on the Black Sea, and a lot of money spent in an area where not many people live, so the infrastructure is not going to be that widely used after the Olympics.  It is certainly going to be used to show off Russia in the opening ceremony which is expected to be something spectacular involving trains and boats and given that the Winter Olympics have much less events than the Summer Olympics, it has been calculated that the average event at the Winter Olympics this year, when you divide the total expenditure by the events, will cost $552 million.