Meanwhile Prime Minister Vladimir Putin reassured visiting Olympic officials that preparations remained on track. “Everything concerning the Olympic project … is protected by the budget and is guaranteed to be financed,” Putin told Jean-Claude Killy after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) team completed an inspection of the Sochi sites late January.

Rosneft is the first company to sponsor the 2014 Paralympic Games. The sponsorship agreement was officially signed by Dmitry Chernyshenko, President and CEO of Sochi 2014, and Sergei Bogdanchikov, President of Rosneft at a ceremony in Sochi. The event was attended by by both Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov and Deputy Prime Minister responsible for the Olympics Dmitry Kozak. Rosneft will also construct more than 150 new petrol stations, with over half in the Krasnodar Region. It will also provide snow mobile and boat refueling facilities in Sochi to aid the development of the city as a yearround tourist center.

The Olympic Organizing Committee has said the telecommunication sponsors would provide $260 million in cash and services and invest another $200 million into local infrastructure under the agreement, which it called the largest of its kind in Olympic history. The announcement did not say how state-controlled Rostelecom, the country’s main long-distance phone provider, and MegaFon, the thirdlargest mobile phone provider, would divide the spending between themselves as the games’ first “Tier One” partners.

The government will spend $6 billion, half of the initially planned $12 billion, by the end of 2009, Putin told the Olympic officials. Russia will set aside 127 billion rubles ($3.6 billion) from this year’s budget to finance Olympic projects, up from 113 billion rubles last year, he said.

Twenty-one facilities for the games are already under construction, and workers will begin building the rest of them this year, Putin said. All Olympic facilities should be ready by the end of 2012 and available for test with lower-level competitions, he said.

Killy said he approved of the plans and the sites that had been picked for the facilities. “There are no obstacles for holding such Olympic Games that will surprise the world,” he said, according to comments posted in Russian on the Cabinet’s web site.

Starwood Hotels and Resorts announced last year that they will build a Sheraton in Sochi in 2011, well in time for the Winter Olympics in February 2014.

According to Sochi 2014 the new 200 room hotel will play an important role in the transformation of Sochi, already Russia’s most popular summer tourist destination with four million plus visitors a year. There are already more than 400 two to five-star hotels, with that number set to increase significantly by 2014.

Since Dmitry Kozak, the former Regional Development Minister, was appointed Deputy Prime Minister with responsibility for the Sochi Olympics in October last year he has lived up to his nononsense reputation. A controversial port and industrial zone just outside the Olympic Zone and abutting an area of proposed hotel development was the first project to be axed.

Investors refused to submit bids to develop hotels in the area of the announced port. They said that while the area has arguably the best beaches in Sochi they were not feasible for long term resort use if a permanent industrial port and industrial warehousing hinterland was going to be located there.

The IOC announced its agreement with SPORTFIVE International SARL (SPORTFIVE), a European sports rights marketing company for the Olympic broadcast rights for the XXII Olympic Winter Games (2014) in Sochi, Russia, and the Games of the XXXI Olympiad (2016).

SPORTFIVE has acquired the rights across all media platforms, including free-to-air television, subscription television, internet and mobile phone, across 40 countries in Europe, excluding France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Turkey and the United Kingdom for which the IOC will negotiate directly.

In February Kozak announced that Olimpstroi, the state entity supervising the construction of the Olympic facilities, had extended deadlines on two tenders for sports centers in Sochi due to an expression of interest by private investors in funding them. The two stadiums are a 12,000 seat ice-skating stadium and a small arena for ice-hockey events. The two projects had a combined construction budget of 10.8 billion rubles which the state had expected to fund. The construction tenders have now been postponed to March 16th.