Jonathan Mahler, Columnist

How to Avoid the Next Sochi

Sochi looks to be another big mess. Maybe there is a better way to run the Olympics.

February 4, 2014 at 3:56 PM UTC

Jonathan Mahler is a sports columnist for Bloomberg View. He is the author of the best-selling "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning," the basis for the eight-part ESPN mini-series. He also wrote "The Challenge," the winner of the 2009 Scribes Book Award, and "Death Comes to Happy Valley." A longtime contributor to the New York Times Magazine and the Times Book Review, Mahler has written for numerous other publications including the Washington Post, Slate, the New Republic and New York magazine. He lives in New York.

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Surprise! The Sochi Olympics are going to be the most expensive in history, at a price of more than $50 billion.

Turns out it costs a lot of money to transform a one-lane town on the Black Sea into the host of the world's largest winter sports event, especially in light of the coincidence that two of the biggest contractors, Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, are childhood friends of Russian President Vladimir Putin.