Stanislav Kuznetsov is very proud of RusSki Gorki Jumping Center, despite the fact the venue was almost not ready for the start of the Sochi Olympics.
"It is one of the best hills in the world. It has many competitive advantages - it can be used year round, it can store a large amount of water ... for making artificial snow," Kuznetsov said.
Kuznetsov's enthusiasm can be explained by his credentials. He is the deputy chairman of the board at Sberbank - the company that stepped in to save the troubled construction of RusSki Gorki in 2012 after the project had fallen far behind schedule and well over-budget.
Norwegian ski-jumping expert Torgeir Nordby - hired in 2006 as a consultant for the planning and construction of the facility - has a more tempered view, possibly because he has been around since the beginning and has seen the many problems encountered along the way.
The first issue was the location. Ski jumping hills require firm, stable ground, which meant the first location had to be changed when an underground creek was discovered. The new location was not much better due to the instability of the soil, so engineers sunk 3,600 iron piles as much as 24 meters deep and poured an "enormous" amount of concrete into the ground, according to ski jumping competition manager Nikolai Petrov.
"It would be fair to say that two thirds of the venue is under the ground," Petrov added. "This was necessary to stabilize the area."
Construction provided even more headaches when Akhmed Bilalov - vice-president of the Russian Olympic Committee - stepped in with his construction company after the initial firm hired to build the jumps quit. Bilalov promised Putin he could complete the project in one year, which Nordby knew was wildly optimistic.
"I said this is impossible, because no matter how many workers you put on a ski jump, they can't work shoulder to shoulder ... you need to do things in the right sequence," Nordby said.
The jumps were scheduled to be completed in 2011, but ski jumpers attending an international event in December 2012 quickly discovered one of the two jumps was not completed.
"We only jumped on the normal hill because the big hill was not ready with snow," Austrian ski jumper Gregor Schlierenzauer told Reuters.
Bilalov was bought out of the project by Sberbank in 2012. Vladimir Putin paid a visit to the construction site early in 2013 and made a sarcastic remark about the budget, which had increased from $34 million to $226 million. Bilalov was promptly removed from the Olympic committee and fled the country, claiming he had been poisoned.
Sberbank was able to complete both jumps in time for the games, ending a long, strange chapter in Russia's $50 billion Olympic odyssey.
"It's working fine, even though it doesn't look that beautiful," Nordby said.
