Putin is smiling tonight: His friend IOC President Bach fixed Russian participation in the Rio Olympics

Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is smiling tonight. His friend, the German President of the IOC Thomas Bach, did what he was asked to do:

The Russian flag will be flying at the Summer Olympics, after all, as the International Olympic Committee decided Sunday that athletes from the nation mired in an ongoing drug scandal will be allowed to compete on the sporting world’s largest stage next month in Rio de Janeiro.
Less than two weeks before the start of the Rio Games, the International Olympic Committee ruled against barring Russia from the Summer Olympics but did approve measures that could reduce the number of Russian athletes participating.

Here is how sports, business and "friendship" mix in Bach´s world:

Bach has been a regular visitor to Russia in his three years as head of the IOC, both before and after the Sochi Olympics. Putin has also shown himself willing to travel to improve contacts with the IOC, giving a well received speech in 2007 in Guatemala — delivered in English, which is rare for Putin — ahead of the vote which gave Sochi the 2014 Olympics.
Since he won Olympic gold in 1976, Bach’s chosen sport of fencing has been transformed, most recently by Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov, a Putin ally who has pumped large sums of his own money into the sport over eight years as president of the International Fencing Federation.
That money has increased the profile of one of the more niche sports on the Olympic program, making for a bigger media presence and glitzier competitions.
Bach also has business connections in Russia. After becoming president of the IOC, he kept his other role as chairman of the supervisory board of Weinig, a Germany company which produces woodworking machinery. Weinig, which did not respond to requests for comment, has a strong presence in Russia, with a headquarters near Moscow and offices across the country.
Besides Bach, several other influential IOC members have long been sympathetic to Russia.

Garri Kasparov about Putin's winter games and the new IOC President

Putin's Sochi games are over, but we should not forget what Garri Kasparov recently wrote about them and about the new IOC President:

New IOC President Thomas Bach’s strained protests about how foreign leaders protesting Sochi are “inserting politics into sport” ignore that fact that selling a huge platform for propaganda and corruption to a dictatorship is also “playing politics.” By Bach’s dubious rationale, the IOC would award the Games to North Korea as long as the venues were adequate and the fees were paid promptly. --

 .... Russians will be left with the environmental disaster, the corruption and the repression, the debts, and the same crooks and thugs who created them all. The future is not bright for Sochi, unless you believe that misery loves company. The 2018 World Cup will be held in Russia and reports are already circulating about how behind schedule the venues are. It will be Sochi times ten.

The Sochi Games were no boost to dictator Putin's grand strategy

The most wasteful and corrupt Olympic Winter Games ever are now history. The godfather of the Sochi games, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, may think that the games were a boost to his grand strategy, but events in Kiev show that his rival "civilizational model" does not have much appeal.

 

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat's analysis is well worth reading:

 

... there is a vast difference between Putin’s grand strategy and both its Czarist and its Soviet antecedents.

The czars sought a “Holy Alliance” to defend a still-extant ancien régime — a rooted, hierarchical system that still governed many 19th-century European societies. But today’s Russia, brutalized by Communism and then taken over by oligarchs and grifters, is not a traditional society in any meaningful sense of the term, and the only thing it has in common with many of its potential developing-world allies is a contempt for democratic norms. In the Romanov era, the throne-and-altar idea still had a real claim to political legitimacy. But there is no comparable claim Putin can make for his own authority, and no similar mystique around his client dictators, be they Central Asian strongmen or Bashar al-Assad.

The Soviets’ claim to be in history’s vanguard, meanwhile, earned them allies and fellow travelers not only in Latin America, Asia and Africa, but among the best and brightest of the liberal West. No comparable Western fifth column seems likely to emerge to enable Putin’s goals. A few voices on the American right have praised his traditionalist rhetoric — but only a few. As beleaguered as America’s social conservatives sometimes feel, we’re a long distance from signing up as useful idiots for a thuggish, obviously opportunistic “family values” crusade.

Which is not to say that Putin’s geopolitical approach is all folly. On the contrary, he often plays the great game far more effectively than his European and American counterparts.

But the weakness of Russia, its government’s corruption and the unattractiveness of its alleged traditionalism all combine to foreclose his grandest ambitions.

This is basically what we’re watching happen in Ukraine. Despite the blunders of the European Union — which courted Kiev without seeming to realize that Russia might make a counteroffer — Putin is struggling to win a battle for influence in a country that both the Romanovs and the Soviets dominated with ease.

And the struggle is particularly telling given that the Great Recession exposed the E.U. as a spectacularly misgoverned institution, whose follies consigned many of its member states to economic disarray. Yet even that record hasn’t persuaded the majority of Ukrainians to warm to Moscow’s embrace instead. It takes much more than mere misgovernment to make the European project less attractive than Putin’s authoritarian alternative.

Expert on Putin's winter Olympics: "A monumental waste of public money"

You cannot blame Vladimir Putin for neglecting his friends. Bloomberg tells us that the dictator's boyhood friend and former judo partner Arkady Rotenberg's companies have been awarded 227 billion rubles ($7.4 billion) of contracts for the 2014 Sochi Winter Games. That is more than the entire budget for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, although it represents only about 15% of the estimate for the Sochi events. 

This is how an expert rates the most expensive - and probably also most corrupt -  winter Olympics ever:

“This is a monumental waste of public money,” Stefan Szymanski, a sports economist at the University of Michigan who tracks Olympic spending, said by phone from Ann Arbor. “A small number of people at the top have control of resources and there is no accountability.”

Rotenberg, 61, is among a handful of men Putin has known since childhood or from his days in the KGB or St. Petersburg government who’ve amassed riches and power during his 13-year rule. Their fortunes have come at times at the expense of men who flourished under his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, and the consequences of the differing wealth pedigrees are on display in Putin’s $50 billion push to prepare Russia for its first Winter Games. The country is considered the most corrupt of the Group of 20 economies by Berlin-based Transparency International. --

While Rotenberg and longtime Putin associates such as Gennady Timchenko, co-founder of oil trader Gunvor, and OAO Russian Railways Chief Executive Officer Vladimir Yakunin, stand to gain from Russia’s Olympian largess, Yeltsin-era tycoons led by Vladimir Potanin and Oleg Deripaska say they’re getting squeezed.

Winter Olympic Games in Sochi : A new level of corruption and exploitation

Vladimir Putin, dictator of Russia, has visited Sochi, the site of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has invited visitors to the 2014 Winter Olympic Games, due to be held in the southern Russian resort of Sochi on the Black Sea next February.

“We invite to Russia all those who love sports and fair uncompromising struggle,” Putin said at a ceremony to mark one year before the start of the 2014 Winter Olympics on Thursday.

“In 2007, the International Olympic Committee [IOC] supported the Olympic dream of millions of Russian nationals,” Putin said. “We are doing everything possible to justify the confidence.”

The Russian president said he hoped the Sochi Games would take world sports to a qualitatively new level.--

Earlier Thursday, Putin called on Sochi 2014 Olympic organizers to redouble their efforts in one final push to stage the Games without a hitch.

Putin may be right about the Sochi games taking "world sports to a qualitatively new level" - a new level of corruption and exploitation. 

Human Rights Watch has just issued a damning report about the slave culture that has been established in Sochi:

 “Race to the Bottom: Exploitation of Migrant Workers Ahead of Russia’s 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi,” documents exploitation of migrant workers on key Olympic sites, including the Central Olympic Stadium, the Main Olympic Village, and the Main Media Center. Workers told Human Rights Watch that some employers cheated workers out of wages, required them to work 12-hour shifts with few days off, and confiscated passports and work permits, apparently to coerce workers to remain in exploitative jobs.

“Like the athletes competing in the 2014 Winter Olympics, Russia has big hopes and dreams for its performance in Sochi as the host,” said Jane Buchanan, associate Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch and author of the report. “But exploiting workers is a victory for no one, and Russia urgently needs to change course.” --

Workers consistently reported that employers failed to pay full wages and in some cases failed to pay workers at all. A group of workers employed on the Main Media Center, the central hub for journalists covering the Olympics, worked for months without wages, hoping to be paid. One worker from Uzbekistan, “Omurbek,” said that in December 2011 a subcontractor on the site offered him a job paying $770 per month.

“I worked for almost three months … for nothing. Nothing but promises, promises from them,” Omurbek told Human Rights Watch.

In a letter to Human Rights Watch, a subcontractor for the Main Media Center project who the workers said hired them, claimed that its workers are paid on time and in full.

Numerous workers on the Central Olympic Stadium site and on the Main Olympic Village site interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that employers withheld the first month’s wages. Workers received their first payment only after working for two months, and were told they would get the first month’s wages only after the employer decided they had completed the job. If they quit or were fired, they would not recover the first month’s wages.

“Athletes, journalists, and Olympic ticket holders in Sochi will watch the 2014 Winter Games in iconic modern sports venues, broadcast centers, and hotels,” Buchanan said. “But many migrant workers have toiled in exploitative, abusive conditions to build these shimmering façades and luxurious interiors.”

Although most migrant workers interviewed by Human Rights Watch signed employment contracts, most were not given copies. In some cases, workers were not given contracts at all.

In several cases documented by Human Rights Watch, employers retaliated against foreign migrant workers who protested abuses by denouncing them to the authorities, resulting in the workers’ expulsion from Russia. Cases like this highlight the vulnerable situation for migrant workers in Russia, particularly those without contracts to document their employment, Human Rights Watch said.

Human Rights Watch says that IOC intervention is urgently needed, but knowing the way IOC operates makes it highly unlikely that it will intervene in any meaningful way. 

And the HRW report is of course only the tip of the iceberg. There are already reports about a brewing mafia war involving prime property in Sochi. Russia's ranking as one of the most corrupt countries in the world will with 100% certainty make the 2014 Winter Olympic Games the most most corrupt games ever.