All set for Sochi as 鈥榗uddly鈥 Putin lands
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Vladimir Putin, rugged outdoorsman and tough-guy Russian president, promoted a cuddly image yesterday as his Olympics drew near.
Putin checked in at a preserve for endangered Persian leopards and visited a group of cubs born last summer in the mountains above the growing torrent of activity in Sochi for the Winter Games.
“We’ve decided to restore the population of the Persian leopard because of the Olympic Games,” Putin said. “Let’s say that because of the Olympic Games, we have restored parts of the destroyed nature.”
Putin entered the cage and petted the leopard on the head. “We liked each other,” he said.
Not so the accompanying journalists. They apparently upset the big cat, which scratched one of them on the hand and bit another on the knee, Russian news agencies reported.
Putin’s first step on the Olympic stage was designed as a show of environmental consciousness during the Sochi Games, which open on Friday. The leopard preserve was established five years ago as an Olympics-related project.
The leopards are living in Sochi National Park in between seaside Sochi and the Alpine venues in the towering Caucasus Mountains. Some of the new leopard population is to be released next year in hopes of repopulating southern Russia, where they became extinct in the 1970.
Putin has thrown open the Kremlin treasury to finance the Olympics, lavishing a record US$51 billion on sports facilities and transportation infrastructure in the resort city on the Black Sea coast.
With the vast sum Putin invested in the Games, he has turned the once-sleepy resort into a kind of Disneyland of phantasmagorical structures — new highways, sweeping overpasses and top-notch sports venues.
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