Winter Olympics 2014: Putin's iron grip can't stop @SochiProblems going viral

 
If anyone can create something more sexually comical than the ice penises, of course, it may well be the serially shirtless Vladimir Putin – easily the campest world leader alive, for all his efforts to appear quite the opposite, and a man who might usefully learn the lesson that in some arenas, the more desperately you try to be taken seriously, the more you run the risk of not being so.

It goes without saying that those over whom Putin has actual power, and on whom he can visit his discriminatory or hardline policies, do not have a lot to laugh about. But those outsiders to whom he is endeavouring to show off with his $51bn Sochi death star appear to be taking things rather less seriously.

The side-by-side bogs, complete with warnings not to fish in them; the Olympic workers charged with spraying dead, brown grass green; the ceiling-mounted power sockets – the list of local quirks has already passed into Olympic legend.

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Winter Olympics 2014: Putin's iron grip can't stop @SochiProblems going viral | Marina Hyde | Comment is free | The Guardian