Remnick explains Putin’s Olympic motivations:
The theme of these Games is simple: this is Putin’s pop-culture reassertion of Russia, a worldwide media-saturated insistence on its modern power and capacities, all done with a flash and a reach that no diplomatic summit could ever match. Dissident Russian voices such as Alexei Navalny, Masha Gessen, and the members of Pussy Riot all call these “Putin’s Games”; they talk of a pharaoh intent on building, and displaying, his pyramids. In fact, minus the tone of derision, when you talk to Russian officials close to Putin, the explanation for his motives is not so different. The level of risk may be greater than anyone quite imagined in 2007, but Putin wants to show that his country is capable of doing more than sucking oil and gas out of the ground and building a new Dubai in Russia. Putin, obviously, is no democrat. Not remotely. He is not interested in the contemporary requirements of human rights. He is not interested in empowering a real legislature or ceding true independence to the courts. Democracy is not his interest. Stability and development—those are his themes, first and last.
Amy Bass thinks it’s impossible to avoid politics at the Olympics:
Inherently contradictory, the Olympics get to transcend everything until they don’t. It is naive to think that sport is above politics, that any kind of level playing field exists, or that sport allows the world to put its problems on hold. The narrative of peaceful competition is disrupted time and again, because the Olympics are inherently political, in ways that are overt, such as the black power protest by Americans Tommie Smith and John Carlos in Mexico City in 1968, and nuanced, such as Czech gymnast Vera Cáslavská lowering her gaze when the Soviet anthem played during her medal ceremonies at the same Games.
(Photo: International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach (L) is greeted by Russian President Vladimir Putin at a welcoming event for IOC members ahead of the 2014 Winter Olympics at the Rus Hotel on February 4, 2014 in Sochi, Russia. Putin has arrived in Sochi to participate in the openings of the Winter Olympics. (Photo by Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images)
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