Spending to build roads and bridges for the 2014 Sochi Olympics has already peaked, he said, as the projects are slated to be operational in 2012.
Despite the impressive size of Russia's road construction market, it has no foreign contractors because of the high entry barriers, Mozalyov said.
Representatives of the dozens of countries participating in the Commonwealth Games, a quadrennial competition among members of the Commonwealth of Nations, started arriving in Delhi in recent days to look at facilities and conduct security checks. The athletes’ village, built for the Games, is not ready, they say, and questions linger about security after an attack on tourists in Delhi on Sunday.
On Tuesday afternoon, a bridge next to Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, the main Games venue, fell apart. The footbridge collapsed into three pieces, taking several workers with it and uprooting one side of the arch that supported it.
The work, budgeted at 705.6 million reais ($398 million) started with the removal of the seats in the lower ring of the stands in the stadium, the likely venue for the final.
Renovations will see the stadium's capacity reduced by more than half to 45,000 for the next 50 days and then closed.
The work is scheduled to be completed by Dec. 31, 2012, in time to stage the Confederations Cup in Rio the following year.
11: The city has two fantastic stadiums already in place, underlining the fact that England already has the facilities to host the 2018 tournament – unlike Russia.
12: There is no need to worry about the transport links either. Manchester Airport is the busiest in the county outside London in terms of passenger numbers.
13: And on the ground, Old Trafford is well served by both train and tram, while the Metrolink will be extended to Eastlands long before 2018.
14: In addition, Manchester is at the heart of the country’s motorway network, so it’s easy to get around.
15: The city’s sporting and transport infrastructure is one of the main reasons FIFA president Sepp Blatter believes it would be, in his words, “easy” to host the World Cup in England.
The sports expert says that one can compare Russia’s situation with South Africa’s in the run-up to the world cup this year. Pretoria spent some three billion dollars to get ready, Ivanov says, but “Russia’s expenses, considering all [its] problems with corruption will be one and a half times greater.”
The idea of pursuing the world cup, the writer says, “according to rumors belongs to Vladimir Putin,” and that explains why “the tactics of the struggle of the Russian Football Union … repeat the pattern of the struggle for the Olympiad in Sochi: Everything is being build on the basis of the personal guarantees of the prime minister.”
About 60 percent of the sports venues are already completed because Brazil hosted the 2007 Pan American Games and -- with an eye toward capturing the big prize -- built those facilities to Olympics specs.
But billions of dollars of sports-driven projects from port renovation and airport overhauls to the construction of major highways, transit systems, stadiums and an Olympic Village complete with a beach are planned. Besides accommodating the influx of fans, athletes and officials, the goal is to leave a lasting legacy for Brazilians.
Russia's bid proposes 14 new stadiums in 13 cities and a massive overhaul of the national infrastructure as part of its bid, making it the most ambitious and expensive competitor for the 2018 tournament.
Inspection team leader Harold Mayne-Nicholls said work would have to start immediately. "I would like to emphasise that, in the case the Fifa Executive Committee decides in December that the World Cup will go for the first time in football history to Russia, work would need to start immediately, to guarantee that everything will be in place right in time."
It means the construction of a new winter community in the North Caucasus mountains, the construction of 300 kilometres of roads, 100km of rail, 39 tunnels and 24 thermal and hydro power stations.
"We are well on track," asserts Mr Chernyshenko, a native of Sochi who was handed the games' baton five years ago.
"Our construction site is now probably competing in terms of size with London's," he says.
This summer, Ernst & Young and the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV) set out to provide answers to such questions. In late June, the two organizations released a sixth installment of their Sustainable Brazil series, entitled “Social and Economic Impacts of the 2014 World Cup”.
The study includes analysis of the socioeconomic impacts of the World Cup and how to make the World Cup “greener,” and it aims to identify ways in which Brazil can ensure that “the event lasts not only a few days, but many years, leaving a positive legacy for society as a whole.” It’s an issue that TheCityFix has explored before, when we considered the legacy of the Olympics. The recent Brazil study predicts that the country’s economy will “snowball,” growing by more than five times the R$22.46 billion (US$12.8 billion) spent by Brazil to ensure adequate infrastructure and organization.
This means that in total, from 2010 to 2014, an additional R$142.39 billion (US$81.39 billion) will flow in Brazil, creating 3.63 million jobs per year, and R$63 billion (US$36 billion) in additional income for the population.
Indeed, organizers are enthusiastically trumpeting their projections that the 9.3 billion pound ($15.2 billion) Olympic project is both on schedule and on budget.
Granted, original financial estimates almost tripled shortly after London was awarded the Games in 2005, beating out Paris and New York, among others. And once the budget was set, the global economy went into the loo, ensuring that finances would match logistics among the massive challenges to creating a successful Games in a city so old, complex and densely populated.
Though London will be the first city to play host to a Summer Games for a third time, it has been a while and the first time the city truly won a bid to do so.
“In my role as Minister for Sport and the Olympics, I am the person responsible for Olympic legacy. Providing a sporting legacy from the 2012 Games is my top priority. We are committed to provide a lasting legacy for athletics. It is vital that we use the 2012 Games to get more people involved in sport and to ensure that our elite athletes are receiving the best possible opportunities and we are working closely with our partners to achieve this goal,” [said Hugh Robertson MP, Minister for Sport and the Olympics from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport]
With four years still to go, that figure will dwarf overall spend for Canada's Vancouver Olympics of about £3.5bn.
The 2014 Games in Sochi, on Russia's southwestern coast, are already dogged by massive controversy and allegations of corruption.
Many homes are in the process of being demolished to make way for the six-stadia Olympic Park.
“We spent decades without making investments and that led to growing problems now showing in the current state of our infrastructure,” LCA Consultores chief economist Braulio Borges, who authored the study, said.
Port infrastructure was responsible for Brazil’s appearing at the bottom of the list with an alarming 2.6 points, wide apart from the 4.2 world average. In railroad quality, Brazil’s 1.8 points were ranked only better than Colombia’s. World average railroad quality was 3.1 points.
Local authorities and tournament organizers have acknowledged that the airports' lack of capacity is one of the main concerns in Brazil's preparations and that significant improvements are needed to accommodate the expected 600,000 World Cup visitors.
A recent report by a government watchdog known as the Brazilian Audit Court warned that renovations in some airports may not be completed by 2014.
For now, though, insiders are tipping Russia for 2018. Fifa delights in tapping new markets through World Cups. Russia is a white spot on Europe’s footballing map. It has never hosted a major football tournament. Crucially, it can muster more lobbying might than its rivals. When Vladimir Putin phones asking for your support, you probably say yes. A Russian World Cup would cost a lot, but if Putin wants to spend the money, Russia will.
As for the 2022 World Cup, the most important words spoken in this race came from a country that isn’t even bidding. Wei Di, new head of China’s football federation, said this month: “I think China should apply for the World Cup [of 2026].”
China’s government will make the decision, not Wei Di. But Fifa would love China to bid. If the country signals it will, that would shape the race for 2022. If China gets 2026, no Asian country could stage 2022, because continents cannot host twice running. The only non-Asian bidder for 2022 is the US. So if China wants to bid, the US would surely get 2022.
They have demonstrated their ability to host large events with the success of the Asian Games held in Doha in 2006. With no shortage of money to devote to construction, the key focus of their promotional bid video is their five proposed new stadia. Each is designed by Albert Speer & Partner, a firm with a history of working at more intrepid scales in the Middle East than at home in Germany.
For a region not shy of symbolism, it might be no surprise that a familiar list of metaphors weighs the proposal down: the dhow fishing boat (Al Shamal Stadium); the seashell (Al Khor Stadium); the national flag (Al Gharafa Stadium); and the oasis (Al Wakrah Stadium), which might also make up for the sole missing metaphor, the pearl, in the form of a spherical glass dome.
In our survey, nearly one half of respondents (49%) point to “low standard or costly infrastructure including telephones, transport networks and utilities” as the main operational obstacle, far more than selected corruption, poor governance (34 percent) or skills shortages (32 percent), the state of transport infrastructure is particularly dire. In spite of some improvement in logistics, freight depends on costly road haulage; there are few railroads; the potential for waterways remains largely unexplored; and ports and airports are congested. This can add one quarter or more to the cost of getting goods to market, say investors.
Investing in infrastructure has been at the heart of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s growth program (the so-called PAC, launched in 2007), but progress has been limited. Fewer than half of the targets for 2010 have been met (with much of the proposed financing going to first-time home owners, rather than into physical infrastructure). High public spending commitments are crowding out the paltry 1 percent of GDP that is proposed for investment in infrastructure, while limited private sector investment in transport will not make up the shortfall.
The bridge - the first on the world's greatest river system - symbolises the surging development at the heart of the world's largest rainforest and will bring much-needed economic opportunities for those living on the far bank. But environmentalists fear that the bridge, combined with new gas pipelines, roads and rising populations, could open up the rainforest to further destruction.
Manaus is the steamy and sprawling industrial capital of the vast Amazonas state, manufacturing the latest flatscreen TVs and mobile phones for the whole of Brazil. It has been an island of wealth for 200 years, but it is now opening up in all directions.
The bridge runs from north to south, to the undeveloped towns of Iranduba, Manacapuru and Novo Airão and towards the untouched jungle. To the west, a 600km gas pipeline will next month begin powering a huge new electricity power station by bringing energy from a pristine part of the forest at Urucu into the city.
“There is a huge amount of work to be done besides political desire, hence the experts’ view that any realistic chance for (hosting the) Olympics in Africa is between 2030 and 2040,” said Nawal El Moutawakel, who chaired the IOC’s coordinating committee for the 2016 Rio De Janeiro Olympics.
“I have read studies by some universities specialising in the Olympics who gave Africa between 2030 and 2040 to host the Games and that is a very realistic chance because Olympics is a different ball game,” she said.
The Novaya Gazeta story focuses on Vladimir Leshchevsky, deputy of construction in the Kremlin's Office of Presidential Affairs – a vast empire that owns about $500 billion worth of former Soviet Communist Party property. It alleges that he took about $5.7 million in kickbacks from the Moskonversprom consortium of construction companies in connection with the renovation of two Kremlin-owned Sochi area sanitoriums.
"To really fight corruption he would have to fire [Prime Minister Vladimir] Putin, who is at the center of the Sochi Olympic scandal, but that's not going to happen," says Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister and a leader of the liberal opposition who ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Sochi in polls last year that some criticized as Kremlin-manipulated. "So he orders an investigation of Leshchevsky, a nobody. It's just a PR action."