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" I know it&amp;#039;s only the middle of the summer, but I&amp;#039;m already excited about the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. Not because of the sports, although a Russian home crowd should add an unpredictable dimension to the hockey finals. More for the far more fascinating spectacle of corruption. Just as the 2008 games in Beijing showed us what state capitalism \u2014 formerly known as tyranny \u2014 was capable of, so the 2014 games in Sochi will show us what kleptocracy, or rule by the thieves, can do. Think of Sochi as the Olympics as run by the Sopranos: The upcoming Gangster Olympiad. There&amp;#039;s an old joke about two corrupt ministers from tin-pot dictatorships, who visit each other in their respective countries. The first minister takes his friend to a massive highway project, spreads his arms, and says &amp;quot;I took twenty percent of this.&amp;quot; When they visit the other&amp;#039;s country, the second minister shows his friend an empty field. &amp;quot;I took a hundred percent of this,&amp;quot; he says. The Sochi Olympics are looking to be somewhere in between these two extremes. An amazing piece of reporting from The Economist last week strung the various problems with the games into a convincingly apocalyptic portrait. The idea of having the games in Sochi in the first place was a bad one. The town is subtropical, and they have had to bank up a year&amp;#039;s worth of snow just to ensure that there will be any snow next year. It&amp;#039;s also worrying close to the various Muslim regions of the Caucasus that have been involved in bloody conflict for decades. But really it&amp;#039;s about the money. The Sochi Olympics are, at the moment, estimated to cost 50 billion dollars. The Vancouver Olympics cost 9.2 billion. The London Olympics cost 13.9 billion. The Gangster Olympics will be a major showcase for the gangster-in-chief of course. There are rumors that he will use the occasion to announce a new wife, making the Sochi Olympics the world&amp;#039;s most expensive engagement party as well: Vladimir Putin sees Sochi 2014 as his own pet project: a sign of his power over people and nature, and of his international legitimacy. That Mr Putin spends a lot of time in Sochi adds a personal touch. Yet, as Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister and opposition leader who has written several reports on Sochi, argues, far from being a model of fair play, Sochi has emerged as a model of crony capitalism, lawlessness, inefficiency and disregard for nature and people. &amp;quot;The Sochi Olympics are an unprecedented thieves&amp;#039; caper in which representatives of Putin&amp;#039;s government are mixed up along with the oligarchs close to the government,&amp;quot; Mr Nemtsov writes. The &amp;quot;thieves&amp;#039; caper&amp;quot; of Sochi will certainly be unprecedented, but it also contains a kind of hilarious logic. The Olympics have always been a way for a few select companies to line their pockets and a few prominent people to expand their profiles. Putin has just put his finger on the reason for their existence. If the Olympics are corrupt, which they are, why not treat them as a festival of corruption? Why not go to the ultimate extreme? With the suppression of dissidents, the imprisonment of Pussy Riot, the passing of anti-gay laws, the Snowden affair, and his ludicrous propaganda portraits riding horses, rescuing underwater antiquities, or riding horses in Siberia, Putin has become the world&amp;#039;s darkest joke. Sochi will be the punchline. But the joke is ultimately on us, on the rest of the world. In other Olympic games, through a combination of taste and fear, the corrupt hold themselves back and try to remain hidden. Sochi is the moment when the corrupt don&amp;#039;t need to restrain themselves or to hide anymore. That&amp;#039;s truly something worth watching: We&amp;#039;ll finally get to see what the world would be like if the gangsters ran it. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/sports/news/a24103/2014-gangster-olympics/?click=main_sr>