Now this is not good - Winter Olympics
How not to roll out the red carpet and how to leave a lasting bad taste in people's mouths.
From the British Columbian newspaper
The Province:
Vancouver man appalled at Sochi conditions after working on ski, snowboarding courses
A Vancouver man may be on his way back home from a work assignment at the Sochi Olympics, days after blogging about Russian red tape, $75 for a couple of small pizzas, a filthy hotel room with muddy water and no hot showers and a two-hour commute.
But the biggest concern for Johnnie Balfour is that he worried he wasn�t going to get paid.
Balfour, who was part of the construction crew for the courses at Cypress Mountain for the 2010 Winter Olympics, blogged earlier this month that he had been invited to help build the Sochi tracks for the 2014 Winter Games that start next month.
�So I�m off to Russia!� he wrote.
The next entry on his Tumblr blog, dated Jan. 21, from Balfour, an ex-Australian soldier who now lives with his wife and baby in Vancouver, is much less enthusiastic. It included a video of his accommodations, �which really doesn�t show how bad this place is,� he wrote.
�The toilet flushes muddy water, there is no hot water, the shower floor is covered in dirt and mud, there was p--- all over the toilet, the water is undrinkable (it�s brown), it�s even sketchy to brush your teeth in it, and the idea of having internet in this place is a joke.�
But the post, that went on to describe troubles with getting his accreditation, negative descriptions of the resort and worrying disputes over payment for the work he and five others were flown to Sochi to do, disappeared from his blog the next day.
�I�ve been told to shut up,� Balfour was quoted as saying in The Australian newspaper on Friday.
The blog was captured before it was deleted and posted to the alpinezone.com online forum.
Alas, the great and powerful Internet Wayback Machine only has two archives for his Tumblr site,
01/24/2014 (last Friday) and
the 25th but some of the deletia are there and will remain there for posterity.
Talk about heavy-handed treatment.
Posted by DaveH at January 27, 2014 11:14 PM