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Paraguay in slopstyle freestyle women. She actually competed for the usa until now and won a world cup medal last season. Can Paraguay become the first Soutth American nation to win a WOG medal?

Togo in women's cross country skiing. She is 19 and is French Togolese.

@BTHarner Tonga is expected to qualify but its not officially done.

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Uh oh. Here comes more dirt!

New Documentary Details Alleged 'Threats And Corruption' Behind Sochi Olympics

A documentary alleging that behind the scenes of the Winter Olympics in Sochi lies greed, extortion and environmental damage is screened for the first time on Sunday
When the Russians knocked on her door for the third time, Simone Baumann knew that the safest course of action was not to answer.

Ms Baumann, 50, had already turned down an offer of £600,000 not to show her controversial film, detailing the corruption involved in building the Sochi Winter Olympic Village. The offer was double the budget required to make the documentary. And the third time they approached her, she refused to meet them.

“In a society where they think they can buy anything — and usually can — if you ask for a price, you are already a buyer,” she said, explaining her refusal to enter into negotiations to sell her film to the Russian authorities. “You must never ask the price. I simply told him that I was not interested and walked away.”

On Sunday night the film that Ms Baumann produced, and that the Russians tried so hard to block, will be screened for the first time. It features a building contractor who was threatened he would be “drowned in blood” if he refused to pay kickbacks of up to 50 per cent of building costs in Sochi, plus the cost of the Olympics to local people who have lost their homes and livelihoods to construction. It also highlights the environmental damage of the games, and questions the wisdom of building the venues on a swampy, sub tropical coastal plain.

“We had permission for all the filming we did in Russia, in Sochi and Moscow, and have no obligation to show it to anyone before tonight’s premiere,” said Ms Baumann, speaking to The Sunday Telegraph from her home in the German town of Leipzig. Along with Alexander Gentelev, the Tel Aviv-based director, Ms Baumann spent two years researching and filming Putin’s Games.

“The film is a co-production between Germany, Austria and Israel and has no Russian money behind it,” she said, explaining her reasons for not allowing the authorities to see the film.

Pressure from Russian authorities on the producers of the feature-length documentary, directed by Russian-born Israeli émigré Mr Gentelev, 54, began last April after the film won a “best project” award at an international television trade market in Cannes. Alerted by Russian journalists who wrote about the project, which was then in post-production, the Russian Olympic Committee and public television stations demanded copies of a brief trailer and show reel.

Ms Baumann, who studied at a southern Russian university in the 1980s and later taught “dialectical materialism” — a Marxist philosophical theory — at East Berlin’s Humboldt University before the fall of the Berlin Wall, ignored them.

She was then approached by someone she knew to have close contacts with Russian officials going back to Soviet times — and refused to meet him.

Such was the displeasure of the International Olympic Committee when it heard of it that it refused to allow the use of the word “Olympic” in the title, or the use of any archived Olympic footage. They also wrote accusing the producers of making a “politically motivated” hatchet-job.

If the Kremlin cannot get a ticket for tonight’s world premiere at Amsterdam’s IDFA, a leading international showcase for documentary film, its officials will have the chance closer to home on Dec 6 when the film is screened at Moscow’s ArtDoc Film Festival, run by acclaimed Russian documentary-maker Vitaly Mansky — a colleague of Ms Baumann.

They may not like what they see.

The producers insist the film contains only firmly-established facts, and is balanced with comments from Anatoly Pakhomov, the mayor of Sochi and a Putin-regime loyalist. However, it contains a key sequence in which construction magnate Valery Morozov reveals the greed, extortion and terrifying threats that eventually forced him to flee with his family to Britain, where he is now living in hiding and has applied for asylum.

“We received explicit threats: ‘You’ll be soaked with blood; drowned in blood,’” he said. “It was very straightforward. We know the history. Russia generally does not care much for human life.”

His complaints, that the levels of extortion — which shot up from as little as a negotiated three per cent kickback when construction first began in 2008 to as much as 50 per cent later — were destroying his business, fell on deaf ears.

When he testified against officials who had attempted to extort £4 million from him, their patience ran out. In December 2011, after a major tax investigation was ordered into his business, fearing for his life and that of his wife and children, he fled Russia.

Mr Morozov, 59, is now working with other Russians that have fallen foul of Mr Putin’s regime and are living in self-imposed exile in London. They hope to expose corruption in his regime through what they call the International Anti-corruption Committee.

His detailed description of how the corruption works to channel money back up to the Kremlin goes a long way to explaining why Mr Putin’s games, costing an estimated £31 billion, are the most expensive Olympics ever.

“We started building a project in Primorskoe,” said Mr Morozov, referring to beachside area of Sochi. “It was a wing of the Sochi Presidential Resort Home. The contract came to 2.5 billion roubles (£47m).

“There was an official who wanted to be bribed. You pay him a commission or else. I call it a ‘corruption tax’. I should have paid him 12 per cent and an additional five per cent, but managed to get it down to three.”

He goes on to describe in detail how the money is paid directly into the Kremlin’s coffers.

“It works like this: the money is brought to the Presidential Administration Department. I go to the fifth floor, pass through security without being screened, and leave the money.”

Mr Morozov, who had long run a successful construction business in Sochi, described how bribes went through the roof when the city and region was declared an Olympic venue. Dozens of major building contracts were issued through Olympstroy, the Russian government-owned body responsible for organising and building the Winter Olympics.

Olympstroy, with its 40 different departments, has more personal chauffeurs for its senior bosses than last year’s London summer Olympics organising committee had on its staff of 32, he said. With high-powered officials involved in building projects — backed by an Olympic law that allows the compulsory purchase and, in some cases outright confiscation of property — it became a free-for-all, Mr Morozov says.

One chinovnik — the Russian slang for a senior official — was told the “going rate” for bribes was five per cent, then asked: “What if it were 50 per cent?”

Mr Morozov added: “I realised he was being serious.”

The money thrown around by the Kremlin to ensure that Russia was awarded the games is also revealed in the film.

Karl Schranz, a former Austrian Olympic skiing champion and personal adviser to Mr Putin on bringing the Olympics to Sochi, talks about the big-money lobbying that went into the games — cash that Leonid Tyagetschev, the former head of Russia’s Olympic Committee, said was “practically unlimited.”

The money was used to lobby for Sochi and against Salzburg, which was also in the running before, in 2007, the International Olympic Committee to give the games to Russia.

The film also features key critics, including leading opposition figures Boris Nemtsov and Garry Kasparov.

No officials from the presidential administration, Olympstroy or government ministries agreed to be interviewed; a mid-ranking official from the federal office for budgetary control told the filmmakers there was no evidence of corruption.

“Sochi today is a microcosm of Russia. Corruption is everywhere,” said Mr Gentelev, the film’s director. “Every leader has a mega-project. For Putin it is the Sochi Olympics.”

And how did a subtropical Black Sea resort with little snow become a winter Olympic venue, in a country with a Siberian hinterland much better suited to cold weather sports?

“Putin likes Sochi, he likes skiing there,” Ms Baumann said. “He is building his own palace down there. It is his personal choice and he is completely behind it.”

Business insider

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Russia set to reward athletes for winning Olympic gold

Russian athletes who taste success at the Winter Olympics at Sochi in February will be rewarded with huge cash bonuses as the host nation bids to knock the United States off the top of the medal table.

Handouts from the Kremlin were announced on Monday, with President Vladimir Putin authorizing payments that will see Russian gold medalists rewarded with four million rubles ($122,000) each, with silver medals worth $76,000 and bronze $46,000. According to the OECD Better Life Index, the average Russian worker makes $15,286 per year.

Information relating to the medal payments was posted on the Russian government website and is aimed at improving the medal haul of the team, which brought back only 15 medals, three of them gold, from the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver. The U.S. topped the medal count with 37, while Canada had the most golds with 14.

Such payments, first instituted in the 1990s following the break-up of the Soviet Union, were originally designed to help athletes who were often surviving on small state subsidies.

Now however, generous as the government’s payouts might seem, they are likely to be dwarfed by additional rewards facilitated by wealthy businessmen who sponsor Russian sports.

Many of Russia’s oil billionaires, whose lavish earnings have been made possible by contracts awarded by the state, have been firmly encouraged by Putin to reinvest a portion of their wealth into Russian sports. As a result, most soccer teams in Russian Premier League are owned by oligarchs, while most Russian Olympic sports federations also have rich backers.

While details on the exact nature of the payments Olympic champions can now receive have been relatively closely guarded, a small insight was provided by the comments of a Russian Olympic Committee member during last year's Summer Olympics in London. Akhmed Bilalov, vice president of the ROC, told the London Telegraph that Russia’s wrestling federation had rewarded gold medalists at the 2008 Beijing Games with payments of up to $500,000, a figure which he expected to double. For summer athletes, additional bonus payments came courtesy of tycoon Vladimir Lisin, who is worth an estimated $24 billion, according to Forbes.

The now-standard benefactor payments may be part of the reason why the government medal awards for Sochi are actually a little lower than those for Vancouver in 2010.

Back then, a gold medal bonus was worth $135,000, with silver receiving around $81,600 and bronze $54,4000. Those payments were expected to deliver a return of 40 medals and at least nine golds, but the team fell well short of expectations.

Russia was also disappointed in its performance at London, where it placed third with 82 medals, with the fourth-highest number of golds (24).

"Russia is no longer the athletic powerhouse it used to be during the Soviet Union," former rower German Prostov told the Moscow Times last summer.

http://sports.yahoo.com/news/russia-set-to-reward-athletes-for-winning-olympic-gold-181020766.html

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Uh oh. Here comes more dirt!

And wouldn't it be a total shock if all of this turned out to be true... Seriously, this seems to sum up nicely all that's wrong about selecting Sochi, too bad the IOC had no interest to cooperate with the producers to give their view on these accusations.

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I don't know if this project/exhibition was posted before?

The Sochi Project: An Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucasus Rob Hornstra en Arnold Van Bruggen
25.10.13 - 02.03.14Dima_SochiProject_tcm10-181206.jpgDima, Matsesta, Russia, 2009 © Rob Hornstra. Courtesy Flatland Gallery (Amsterdam, Paris)

The Winter Olympics in 2014 will be held in the South Russian Sochi. It will be the most expensive Games ever, in a subtropical resort and near the very brutal North Caucasus. Since 2009, photographer Rob Hornstra and author Arnold van Bruggen have worked without interruption on a comprehensive documentary about this controversial conflict area.

The Sochi Project wishes to inform as many people as possible of the people, the country and the turbulent history of this small, but complex region. Topics including corruption, violence, terrorism and tourism are the common themes throughout the project. At regular intervals, finished stories have been released in the form of publications and presentations. This exhibition is the sum total of five years of in-depth, slow-journalism research.

Right from the start in 2009, the funding of The Sochi Project relied on donations from private donors. While Crowdfunding was then unique in Europe, it has since been much imitated.
The Sochi Project does not only receive international attention on account of the unique funding model, it is also amassing numerous international awards. Accordingly, the first annual publication ‘Sanatorium’ received the New York Photo Book Award in early 2010. This was followed by the Dutch Canon Prize, the World Press Photo Award, the Sony World Photography Award and the Magnum Expression Award.

The closing publication ‘The Sochi Project: An Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucasus’, published by Aperture, will be presented during the first major retrospective of The Sochi Project at FoMu in the autumn of 2013.
The exhibition runs until the Winter Olympics in February 2014 and will also stop at the Winzavod Museum for Contemporary Art in Moscow and the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago. www.thesochiproject.org

Photo Museum Antwerp

http://www.fotomuseum.be/en/index_fomu.jsp?layout=fomu

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Israel will send 5 Winter Olympians--3 figure skaters including a pair, a short track speed skater, and an alpine skiier--to Sochi. Interesting that all but one of them are of Slavic heritage, so they'll be emerssed in that enviroment there.

http://www.jpost.com/Sports/Israel-announces-its-5-athlete-delegation-to-Sochi-Olympics-333031

Julia Marino's Paraguay Winter Olympic story, born there but adopted by Americans at 6 months:

http://www.wickedlocal.com/winchester/features/x800881899/Winchesters-Julia-Marino-competes-for-Paraguay-in-the-Winter-Olympics

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Putin Visits Still-Unfinished Olympic Stadium
02 December 2013 | Issue 5267
5267-02-stadium2.jpg
Lesya Polyakova / AP

Two stadiums are illuminated in Sochi’s Olympic park: the Olympic Bolshoi stadium and the Iceberg stadium.

President Vladimir Putin visited Sochi's main Olympic stadium near the Black Sea coast on Friday only to see construction workers and equipment still spread around the venue, which is still unfinished just more than two months before it will host the opening ceremony of the Winter Games.

Originally supposed to be done in time for ceremony rehearsals to start in August 2013, Fisht Stadium's completion date remains unclear. The venue, which is the biggest of six newly built Olympic facilities in the so-called "coastal cluster," is still surrounded by cranes, its construction having been delayed due in part to multiple changes in its design.

The delays leave opening ceremony organizers little time to rehearse inside the 40,000-person stadium. Preparations for the opening show are being led by Konstantin Ernst, general director of the powerful state-owned Channel One, who is under pressure to create a grandiose ceremony that will showcase the achievements of the new Russia under Putin's leadership. The exact contents of the show have been kept a closely guarded secret, but it is expected to be watched by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

During Putin's inspection of the venue Friday, he was accompanied by Ernst, on whom he seemed to place responsibility for its design, calling him "in many ways the real architect of the stadium."

"Because the stadium was made in accordance with your scenario of opening and closing ceremonies," Putin said, pointing to the huge temporary roof that spans the two sloped sides of the venue.

"This is a unique stadium that has almost no precedent in Europe," Ernst replied, standing in front of the spot where Putin will deliver his opening speech.

"This is no longer a stadium but a venue that can also be used for large-scale circus performances, such as Cirque du Soleil and Formula One shows," Ernst added.

At a meeting chaired by Putin on Thursday with a small group of high-ranking officials directly responsible for the Olympics, the president referred to the fact that Fisht Stadium was not yet finished.

"We still need to talk more carefully and in more detail about, for example, the main Olympic stadium where the opening and closing ceremonies will take place," Putin said. "This is because the equipment needs to be installed, and all the necessary preparatory work has to be done."

The exact completion date for the stadium is unknown. According to a report aired Friday on Channel One, the stadium will be finished in December. Ilya Dzhus, a spokesman for Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak, who is in charge of Olympic preparations in the government, said by phone Friday that the stadium would be completed "soon."

Dzhus deferred to Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov for more details. Peskov could not be reached for comment by phone on Friday.

On a recent evening visit by a Moscow Times reporter to the giant construction site, it resembled a space launch site, with bright lights aimed in various directions amid building equipment and incomplete structures.

The area, which is located in the Imeretinskaya Valley, one of the few plains at the bottom of the Caucasus Mountains, appeared to be filled with mist, which on closer inspection was in fact a huge and expanding cloud of dust.

Each of the six coastal Olympic venues — the Shayba Ice Skating Arena, the Bolshoi Ice Dome, the Ice Cube Curling Center, the Adler Arena Skating Center, the Iceberg Skating Palace, and Fisht Olympic Stadium — came into view occasionally, distinguishable by its color scheme.

Groups of workers, most of them young men, roamed the newly built but still unlit streets, which were freshly paved with dark asphalt. Many of them stood on the sides of the roads smoking and drinking canned beverages.

Workers from Serbia, Korea, CIS countries and other nations, as well as from within Russia, have assembled in a largely uncoordinated effort to help make Putin's Sochi vision a reality.

"It is a complete mess down here," said Ivan, a construction worker from the Stavropol region, who refused to give his last name due to fear of dismissal.

Ivan and several colleagues said they were sent to Sochi to help build a ski resort developed by state-owned gas giant Gazprom. In reality they were not doing much of any work at all, they said, while the subcontractor was still paying for them to be in Sochi.

"It is a corruption scheme, but at least we can see the country," Ivan said.

While some construction workers have little to do, Putin has made clear that plenty of work remains for Olympics organizers.

"We have the festive season, New Year's Eve and Christmas ahead of us," Putin told officials on Thursday. "I wanted to tell you, even though it is clear anyway: For you, the New Year will be on the last day of the Paralympic Games, March 17."

"You will meet the New Year on March 18 — you and everyone working on Olympic sites," he said, while the officials sat frozen in silent approval.

Read more: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/putin-visits-still-unfinished-olympic-stadium/490620.html#ixzz2mXMr5KZ4

The Moscow Times

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If there was any Opening Ceremony I'd like to see suffer organisational failure it is this one - if not just to see the humiliation on Putin's face on live international television. He takes things to heart - look at his reaction to Russia's performance in 2010.

I can't wish public failure of that magnitude on anyone. I'm not enamored with Putin or Russia, but when so many people work so hard to create something beautiful and momentous and then it fails in a spectacularly public way, I have to believe that is agony. I suppose it is character-building in a meaningful way, but the present anguish must be terrible.

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If there was any Opening Ceremony I'd like to see suffer organisational failure it is this one - if not just to see the humiliation on Putin's face on live international television. He takes things to heart - look at his reaction to Russia's performance in 2010.

Eh. They had Kazan this past summer. They have the other stadia there to rehearse in. A few rehearsals at Fisht will do it. They are getting consummate professionals to put it together...so I have no worries that they'll it off.

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According to media reports this morning, German President Joachim Gauck has decided to break with tradition and is not going to attend any ceremonies or events in Sochi.

He comes from the East German civil rights movement and has in the past already criticised Russia's current politics and suppression of HR, so this shouldn't come as a surprise. I think it's a smart move - obviously, athletes cannot really boycot because competing in the Olympics is what they've worked for all those years, if they actually care, and I think many won't care anyway.

But there's no real need for Heads of State to attend if they feel they would be decoration in a show that is used as cover up of some far more important issues.

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OTTAWA - The gauntlet has been dropped.


Russian ambassador Georgiy Mamedov warned Team Canada this week not to expect a repeat of Russia's crushing quarter-final defeat by the men's hockey team in Vancouver's 2010 games.


And he promised Russia will give Canada a run for its money during the Sochi Winter Olympics in February.


The Canadian team wiped the ice with the Russians with a decisive 7-3 victory four years ago. Russia never made it to the podium. Canada won Olympic gold.


Mamedov admits he's still smarting from the defeat.


“I'm quite confident we'll get a gold in hockey, and I only hope that you'll make it to the finals,” he quipped Friday.


The ambassador did praise Canadian athletes for their strong showing in Vancouver - they came third in overall medal count and top for gold - and said he expects they'll make their country proud in Russia next year.


“The only sport I will vehemently wish you failure is hockey,” he said.


“Because I understand that though our offence is very good on our team, you probably have a better defence and goalie. And this sometimes makes the difference. Not only in the Stanley Cup but in the Olympics, as well.”


But he said Russian coaches have been bolstering their defensive game and will have the advantage of the larger ice surface that Russian hockey players are used to.


Mamedov also concedes a soft spot for Pittsburgh Penguins centre Sidney Crosby -- who scored Canada's winning goal in Vancouver -- for his leadership and affability, over the Washington Capitals’ Alex Ovechkin, who plays for Team Russia.


The prime minister's office refused to get pulled into the hockey rivalry.


“We'll let Team Canada's talent speak for itself on the ice in Sochi,” Carl Vallee, a spokesman for the prime minister, said on Saturday.

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According to media reports this morning, German President Joachim Gauck has decided to break with tradition and is not going to attend any ceremonies or events in Sochi.

He comes from the East German civil rights movement and has in the past already criticised Russia's current politics and suppression of HR, so this shouldn't come as a surprise. I think it's a smart move - obviously, athletes cannot really boycot because competing in the Olympics is what they've worked for all those years, if they actually care, and I think many won't care anyway.

But there's no real need for Heads of State to attend if they feel they would be decoration in a show that is used as cover up of some far more important issues.

It's not really a tradition that the German Presidents attend all editions of the Olympic Games. Gauck's pre-predecessor Horst Köhler, for example, didn't visit Vancouver during the 2010 Olympics and Paralympics either. One shouldn't forget either that Köhler also "boycotted" the Beijing 2008 Olympics (just like Chancellor Merkel), but at least visited Beijing during the Paralympics.

However, I applaud Gauck on his decision. It's a brave statement - especially when it's rather uncommon for a German President to make such bold political statements, especially towards foreign countries (respectively foreign regimes).

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It's not really a tradition that the German Presidents attend all editions of the Olympic Games. Gauck's pre-predecessor Horst Köhler, for example, didn't visit Vancouver during the 2010 Olympics and Paralympics either. One shouldn't forget either that Köhler also "boycotted" the Beijing 2008 Olympics (just like Chancellor Merkel), but at least visited Beijing during the Paralympics.

However, I applaud Gauck on his decision. It's a brave statement - especially when it's rather uncommon for a German President to make such bold political statements, especially towards foreign countries (respectively foreign regimes).

Sorry, I stand corrected. I was sure that Köhler was at Vancouver, but anyway, it is certainly a signal that others should (but probably won't) follow.

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