If you’ve turned on the TV at all in the past week, you’ve probably seen the Olympic coverage — and all of the problems in Sochi. Heck, there’s even a Twitter account named @SochiProb.
But to get a better idea of how bad these problems are — and have another excuse to poke fun at a country that picked its summer resort city to hold the winter Olympics — here are what the Sochi blunders would be like if they were on a landscape project.
Maybe the most prominent error so far is the snowflake that didn’t expand into an Olympic ring during the opening ceremony (unless you live in Russia, because then you saw video from the rehearsal where the flake did open correctly).
This would be like hanging a massive amount of Christmas lights for weeks on for your best account. The clients invite the entire city for the big reveal, and when you turn the lights on, you get this. I’m guessing there wasn’t much peace in this household…
When Russia won the bid for the Olympics, they estimated costs would be at $12 billion.
By the time the Olympics actually started, they had spent about $50 billion — a difference of $38 billion. (That would pay for 50 round trips to the moon.)
If you tell your client a patio is going to cost $3,000 and then send them a bill for $15,000, you might need protection like this to hide from their wrath. Plus, I’m pretty sure you’d have a legal battle on your hands — but I guess that doesn’t apply to Putin.
When reporters turned on the water in their Sochi hotel rooms, it came out looking like something from the swamp… or toilet.
They were advised not to drink it or put it on their face. (I don’t think I would have needed to be told that.)
If this had been coming from a water feature, at least clients would know not to drink from it — or have any living organism within a 100 feet of it (except for these guys).
I guess Sochi isn’t too concerned about liability issues of having people fall down uncovered manholes. I get that they were over budget, but there are some things you just can’t go without. You’re already over $38 billion, what’s a few manholes?
That would be like a landscaper working on a tight budget to renovate a lawn. Then, instead of figuring out what they can downgrade to give clients a complete project, Russia would probably produce something like this photo below — where they spent as much as they could on sod and then just stopped when they ran out of money. Something tells me that’s not going to grow in.
And if all of these things weren’t enough, there’s also that they underpaid or didn’t pay workers, have unfinished buildings/hotels, the country isn’t too welcoming to Americans and they put toilets next to each other. But it’s not like the country asked for all of these extra travelers and worldwide attention, right? Wait…
