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Sochi 2014 - the race is on

IT IS DARK when we step from our plane onto the tarmac. It’s almost midnight, and a gentle sea breeze brings the fragrance of lush meadows and orange blossom wafting towards us. The leaves of a few dozen Washingtonia cotton palms which line the empty parking space - dark shadows against a sky glistening with stars - rustle sleepily. A dog howls in the night. Or maybe it’s a jackal? A Mediterranean setting. And yet we are in Russia. And we have come to ski.

A few miles inland, leaving the cypresses, banana trees and flowering magnolias behind, we pass through ancient forests of oak, beech and chestnut. Then, quite unexpectedly, heaps of snow start to line the road. As we climb higher, a continuous white crust spreads over crippled firs and rhododendron bushes.

Sochi: favourite Black Sea resort of the Tsarist intelligentsia, as well as Stalin and the communist aristocracy - and now the confirmed location for the 2014 Winter Olympics. A sub-tropical spa stretching for hundreds of miles along the shore - and at the same time an alpine national park of almost 200,000 hectares along the slopes of Mount Elbrus, part of the Caucasus mountain range between Russia, Abkhazia, and Georgia in the west, and the Caspian Sea in the east. With peaks of almost 6,000 metres, these are Europe’s equivalent to the Himalayas.

Russia’s autocratic President Putin, addicted skier and ingenious political orator, gave his passionate speech in front of the International Olympic Committee (both in fluent French and English) in Guatemala City early in July to bag a majority vote in favour of Sochi (eliminating South Korea and even Salzburg). The forced investment of Putin’s skiing buddies, Miller (Gasprom), Procherev and Potanin (Norilsk Nickel), Deripaska (Russian Aluminium) and a handful of other trusted oligarchs will pay off handsomely now, even more so as nobody will doubt any more the 12 billion dollars Putin has promised to contribute from his budget. This is what friends are for, after all, isn’t it?

The once-bumpy mountain road to Krasnaya Polyana has already been replaced by a two-lane highway. The new airport between Sochi and the winter resort looks as if the European Union had paid for it with largesse. Penny-pinching is not a Russian vice. We checked in at the Radisson SAS on the main road, Ulitsa Zashitinikov Kavkaza (‘Street of the Defenders of the Caucasus’) - one of many mega-luxury hotels to be built in the coming months. Our ‘room’ was a three storey mansion with five bedrooms, six bathrooms, a sauna, two large dining rooms, two drawing rooms, three open fireplaces, and a roaring log fire tended by a uniformed flunky. The espresso machine was on, the samovar bubbling, and the fridges in both open-space kitchens filled up with wine and champagne. We weren’t quite sure if we could leave our ski boots on the

valuable rugs or if we should store them in one of the mock Louis XV closets.

The ski resort, as we saw it the next day, had everything: first-class rentals, restaurants, leisure centres, boutiques (selling skiwear

from Dolce & Gabbana to Dior) – everything first class except, alas, the five meagre lifts which so far serve a very limited range of pistes. Yet logging has started in earnest already, and trainloads of flashy Doppelmayr cabins wait along the roadside to be put in

Vertikalny Mir (www.vertikalny-mir.com), Russia’s leading heliskiing operator, organises heliski adventures on the Kamchatka peninsula, around Lake Baikal, and in the Elbrus mountains of Sochi/Kasnaya Polyana, offering runs of 1500 vertical metres on average, some even up to 2000 metres. A six-day package for 3,500 euros includes the necessary visa invitation (not consular fees), accommodation in double rooms, full board, powder skis, and safety kit, consisting of airbag, transceiver, shovel, probe and first-aid kit. The price is calculated for seven hours’ flight time for a group of 12, which equals approximately 20,000 vertical metres. In a good week one can expect to pay a few hundred euros per person more for additional flight time. Transfer flights from London via Moscow or Istanbul have to be arranged individually.

Russia’s autocratic President Putin, addicted skier and ingenious political orator, gave a passionate speech in front of the International Olympic Committee (both in fluent French and English) in Guatemala City early in July to bag a majority vote in favour of Sochi (eliminating South Korea and even Salzburg)

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place. We didn’t have to wait for them to take us up the mountain. Vertikalny Mir, the leading heliskiing operator in Sochi, had hired a Russian military helicopter for the four of us. It could easily carry a platoon of 30 soldiers in more belligerent parts of the Caucasus.

Andrey, our guide, tells the ‘creation legend’ of all the poor peoples of this world: “When God gave each people their own country, he forgot about the Abkhazians. He thought for a moment, and then decided to give them a piece of paradise as compensation. And this is true, you know. This stretch of mountains along the Abkhazian border, with its lakes, waterfalls, rare trees, and abundant wildlife, is the best part of paradise.”

We could see for ourselves: giant peaks with ridges like great white blades, rugged and glacier-heavy, with frozen ice walls and vertical rock cliffs in shades of dolomite and slate, as far as one could see. To the east, the Mount Elbrus throne, reigning over many hundreds of miles of uncountable peaks; to the west, the endless azure-coloured Black Sea, welded to the sky by a ribbon of misty clouds some 200 miles away in the north; and to the south, adorned by the glittering Kashkar mountains of Turkey’s East Anatolia.

“Real snow is guaranteed,” said Mr Putin to the Olympic delegates. This is a promise he can make easily, cross my heart. As long as climate change does not close down the Atlantic conveyor belt and shut down the West winds by doing so, snow will be in Sochi, even if Europe melts away. All the humidity of the Black Sea is deposited as white, fine powder on these insurmountable ridges of the Caucasus. Even a man less brave than Putin would endorse his promise. Me, for instance.

You don’t have to check in at one of the luxury temples of Russia’s nouveau riche, and you certainly don’t have to buy one of the futuristic alpine, high-tech, sleekly designed open-space apartments of

Katerina-Alpik, the future haunt of the super rich, now on sale (www.umaco.org, tel. +78622 60 85 12). There will be some humble B&Bs too, serving just plinis and caviar in the morning.

There will be Banja-Land, too - a place in the woods where flute music and dancers guide you to the world’s greatest collection of sauna rituals: Finnish, Indian, Japanese Furo, Russian Banja, even the legendary Black Banja, complete with red-hot stones and black ashes (Banja-Land, Sapovednaya Street 94, tel. +78622 43 7679 / 43 7044). I had chosen a programme which included bathing in a cauldron over an open fire under the stars, followed by a massage performed by the tiny feet of a presumably very lovely young girl - or maybe even two - who, alas, I couldn’t see, because I was blindfolded (to help me relax, they said).

President Putin is a worryingly autocratic figure, but he has certainly alerted skiers across the Alps to a very special region. And yet - almost a shame, I can’t help thinking to myself, to sacrifice this pristine wilderness to the noisy business of sport-sponsorship, media marketing, and roaring commercials.

Dede Jo

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EatingVarenintshnaya Chata, a small fast-food place next to Rosneft’s petrol station 269. Here you get the best varenikis in the entire former Soviet Union: little boiled ravioli filled with either mushrooms, or potatoes with onion, or cabbage, or meat, or game, or trout, or, the crown of them all, sour cherries, only found in the real varenikis…(Varenitshnaya Chata, gas station 269 Rosneft, tel. +78622 43 8057). Judging by all the S class Mercedes and BMW off-roadsters parked in front, the Russian Rich have not yet forgotten how to price good, home-cooked food.

HeliskiingSkiing can get as steep as Alaska (which is very steep),

or as gentle as most of British Columbia, if you join an intermediate group and stick to the glaciers. We

skied down couloirs where we had to cut entrance holes through overhanging cornices before we could fall down the first 100 metres into the void - not recommended really for a more cautious skier. Slush triggered regularly by the guides looked more like avalanches to me, thundering down at high speed. There is some beautiful tree skiing too, through giant firs and spruce. The views are breathtaking. Some runs offer distant

views over the Black Sea, others lead through a fairy-tale world of frozen waterfalls and sheer ice

cliffs. The MI 8 military helicopters, mammoths of the skies, move safely and with great precision. They

can hover motionless in the air at the steepest cliffs. And they are cosily heated, offer hot tea and indoor lunch,

in case it should get too cold outside for the usual picnic. Ski gear can be put anywhere really in this 30-square metre cabin

- no complicated basket loading, no frozen bindings. The noise, alas, can be considerable. Ear protection is recommended.

‘To the east, the Mount Elbrus throne, reigning over many

hundreds of miles of uncountable peaks; to the west, the endless

azure-coloured Black Sea, welded to the sky by a ribbon of misty

clouds some 200 miles away in the north; and to the south, adorned by the glittering Kashkar mountains of

Turkey’s East Anatolia’