The 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, were a scam from the very start. Sochi is a resort city with mild weather that had nothing close to the infrastructure necessary to host the Olympics, yet the initial budget was only $12 billion dollars. In comparison, the budget for the 2010 Winter Olympics—held in the much more developed Vancouver, Canada, whose metro area is seven times bigger than Sochi—was $8 billion. The real final cost of everything in Sochi, as documented in this exhaustive Businessweek piece? $51 billion.
But Vladimir Putin had a plan, you see! Instead of the Russian government shouldering the $39 billion in cost overruns. they were going to get rich Russian oligarchs to do so. While it seemed like a harebrained scheme, there was at least the "hope" that Putin's government was so corrupt that it could essentially run a protection racket, and demand the oligarchs pay to be able to continue doing whatever shady things got them rich in the first place.
Today, almost exactly a year after the opening ceremonies, AP dropped a big story on the Games's finances. You'll be shocked to learn that, with oil prices dropping and Russia facing a financial crisis, the plan has fallen apart and the Russian people will end up biggest losers, ultimately paying for the entire thing with their tax money.