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Sochi marks 200 days before opening of 2014 Olympics

Authorities hope the Games will give a new impetus to the city as a mountainous and climatic resort
Photo ITAR-TASS
Photo ITAR-TASS

SOCHI, July 22 (Itar-Tass) - City of Sochi is marking 200 days left before the opening of the 22nd Winter Olympic Games. The opening ceremony of the Games will be held February 7, 2014, at the Fisht stadium in the city’s Olympic Park.

According to a report by the Sochi’2014 Organizing Committee, the Olympic Games will last seventeen days, the course of which the athletes will compete for 98 sets of medals.

The program has been expanded through the addition of twelve new types of competitions. This is an absolute record in the history of the Olympic Games of modernity.

Nine new types of competitions have emerged in cross-country skiing. Command competitions have appeared in figure skating and luge, and a mixed relay race has been introduced in biathlon.

Sources at the Sochi municipality said the city residents are looking forward to the festive date of the opening and are eagerly counting down the days and even hours.

“Sochi has lived amid large-scale construction projects,” city mayor Anatoly Popov said. “Revamping has concerned all the spheres of life in this beach city - transport, service lines, the power engineering sector, housing and public utilities, the social sphere, and many other things.”

“The rates of this revamping were unseen hitherto and now these efforts are drawing to a completion,” he said. “Now we can easily compare what we had before the start of the Olympic project and what we have now.

When the Olympic Games end, the city will get more than 360 km of new automobile roads and bridges, 54 railway bridges with a total length exceeding sixteen kilometers, and more than 200 km of new railway lines.

In the course of preparations for the Games, 480 km of low-pressures gas pipelines were built and a high-pressure pipeline stretched across a distance of 174 km from Dzhugba to Sochi.

Authorities hope the Games will give a new impetus to the city as a mountainous and climatic resort. New hotels and other accommodation facilities that are being built will have a total capacity of 24,000 rooms.