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#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}A few hours before President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia spoke at a ceremony in the Bolshoy Ice Dome in Sochi in February, marking a year to the start of the 2014 Winter Olympics, I was watching pensioners strip to the waist and bask in the midday sunshine on a beach a few miles from the Olympic Park.
Sochi offers a delicious respite from the cold of Russia. For a Moscow resident like me, the city is a luscious feast of green, with no hint of winter on its palm-lined avenues even as snow blankets the capital.
James Hill for The New York Times At the luge track in Krasnaya Polyana, part of the Mountain Cluster for the 2014 Winter Olympic Games.The idea of the Winter Olympics, the first Winter Games to take place in a subtropical zone, seems ambitious, as is the price tag. The combined cost of the Olympic sites and the infrastructure projects supporting them is set to make these Games history’s most expensive. Everywhere you look, something enormous is being built at a furious pace.
Leaving the Olympic Park and the Black Sea and heading up a cliff-lined valley for 30 miles brings one to the ski resorts, where the Alpine events will be staged. There was not much snowfall there this winter. Only after boarding a gondola to go up the mountain could one see the snow lying thickly on the men’s downhill course, covering its most dangerous point, a turn known, naturally enough, as Russian roulette.
James Hill for The New York Times Workers on the Bolshoy Ice Dome.James Hill, who frequently shoots for The New York Times, is an award-winning photojournalist based in Moscow.
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