Big Bad Brand #4: Olympics
,aspect=fill;Crop,size=(768,337),gravity=Center)
Citius, Altius, Fortius – Communiter
Or as others may know it as, Faster, Higher, Stronger – Together. This is the Olympic motto, one that seeks to unify athletes that were excellent in their sports across the communites and societies of the world. However in a bid to unify the people, the Olympics have occasionally neglected the environmental degradation it has brought about to the lived environment.
The 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics may ring a bell for many given the heavy Game’s environmental toll. The games caused forced evictions and irriversible environmental destructions to the locals, all in the name of having the rights to host an Olympics. It was also the first ever Olympics featuring an entirely newly built “ski and resort infrastructure” from scratch (Johnson, 2016).
Mountain-Sea Complex
The Sochi authorities had plans to create a mountain-sea complex which would be largely located within the Sochi Natural Park and Sochi State Natural Reserve. These places included environmentally sensitive or susceptible areas but were bypassed by the Russian Olympic commitee in order to recreate the Olympic Experience they had envisioned.
The constructions proceeded and led to: ” illegal deforestation; 1.5 million tons of gravel were illegally seized from the Mzymta River, leading to the degradation of the natural landscape and risk of floods and erosion; it contaminated the river with chemicals such as arsenic; and, lastly, it led to illegal soil dumping, which resulted in irreparable damage to aquifers and the disappearance of water from the Akhshtyr wells” (O’hara, 2014, p.208).
Dump and Quarry in Akhshtyr
Akhshtyr is located in the Caucasus Mountains, between the Olympic venues on Sochi’s Black Sea coast and the alpine Olympic venues in the resort of Krasnaya Polyana. To link venues, a 48km railway and highway was built. To faciliate construction waste and dumping, authoirites built “quarries and a huge garbage dump for construction waste” and “paved the dirt road running through the village to enable trucks to access them” (Lokshina, 2014).
The construction works impacted the local residents, polluting the air with dust and noise pollution from the heavy works.
While constructing the dirt path for trucks, the aquifers of Akhshtyr was destroyed, leaving 4 out 5 completely covered and 1 of it unsafe due to pollution (Gazaryan & Shevchenko, 2014). As a result, water disappeared from Akhshtyr wells; locals were left with polluted waters and dusts that continue to pollute the once pristine air.
While Olympic as a brand has always championed excellency, to what extent then do we allow Olympic as a brand to allow for such environmental degradation?
References
- Gazaryan, S., & Shevchenko, D. (2014). Sochi-2014: Independent environmental report.
- Lokshina, T. (2014, February 25). Akhshtyr: The punished village. Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/02/25/akhshtyr-punished-village
- O’Hara, M. (2015). 2014 Winter Olympics In Sochi: An Environmental And Human-Rights Disaster.