Ski resort for 2014 Games still under construction

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) - The mountain resort that will host much of the 2014 Winter Olympics looks terrific, with mountains and trees covered in snow, a village for athletes and plenty of hotels and other buildings, plus a gentle lake running through town.

OLY 2014 Sochi Alpine

At least, that's how it looks in the computer-generated version Russian officials showed off Monday.

The real version? More of a work in progress.

Lead investor Vladimir Potanin said with a smile that the massive construction project that's basically been started from scratch is "close to (the video) and far from that at the same time."

He remains confident everything will be finished in plenty of time for the next Winter Games, even after a financial downturn that caused his personal wealth to plummet from $19.3 billion in 2008 to $2.1 billion in 2009, according to Forbes magazine.

"The slopes are close to being finalized and they are more or less on schedule," Potanin said. "The major part of the whole construction will be finalized by the year 2012, when we will have the World Cup for Alpine skiing. The Olympic village and other facilities, as a whole, will be finalized by the year 2013, which means we will have one year to test everything before."

Like the Vancouver Olympics are split between the city and its suburbs and Whistler, the next Winter Olympics will be split between the "coastal cluster" in the town of Sochi on the Black Sea and the "mountain cluster" at the Rosa Khutor resort. (The name means "Rose Farm" in English.)

Potanin's company, Interros, began building Rosa Khutor in 2003 as a world-class ski course that could be enjoyed by the middle class in Russia and throughout Europe. Four years later, Sochi was named host of the 2014 Games.

The resort is a major part of the bid. Among the events on the mountain: Alpine, snowboarding, freestyle, biathlon, ski jumping and sliding.

Potanin said the tab for getting ready will be around $2 billion. His company is spending around $1.5 billion on an athletes' village, hotels, restaurants and other everything else, with the government taking care of "roads, electricity and other elements of the infrastructure."

Because the Alpine course always was at the heart of this resort, the moneymen hired a top designer — Bernhard Russi, the 1972 Olympic champion downhill skier who also designed courses for the Winter Olympics in Albertville, Lillehammer, Nagano and Salt Lake City.

He's been involved since the start in 2003. Over those years, Russi, who is Swiss, has dealt with language problems and had to teach construction workers how to do this kind of work.

And, of course, there was that nasty change in finances.

"There was a little break, a little slowdown you could say," he said. "Then it went off again. Now we are just normal."

Russi said he was "never, ever, ever" asked to cut any corners.

"They said sport was the most important thing and we're not going to make any compromises," he said.

Russi said the course is 70 percent done, including the gondolas and ski lifts. In a few weeks, he's hosting a gathering of race directors there to start plotting where to put gates; that will let them know where to build fences and other safety features.

Based on what he's seen over his various trips to Rosa Khutor, Russi guesses that some apartments and other structures seen in the virtual-reality DVD may not be finished by 2014, "but all we need for the Olympics, I'm sure it will be perfect."

"When it comes down to buildings, they are very fast," Russi said. "It takes a long time for them to start, but once they start — and I can see this with the roads and everything else — it's much faster than we do it in Europe. They never stop working. They have no day- or night-time. They have no Sunday or Saturdays. It's going on all the time."

The first major event scheduled at Rosa Khutor is the European Cup in 2011. Of course, Russi already has made his way down the mountain.

"I've skied it, but not groomed," he said, smiling. "Skied it in powder. Fantastic!"

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