A poker-faced Russian policeman abandoning his patrol car to lead me happily on foot to my destination, translating on his iPhone as he went, was a welcome early sign that fears the atmosphere would be oppressive and overbearing were misplaced.
But the buzz in the Bolshoy Arena as Russia took on the USA was hard to beat in a match that had everything except victory for the hosts, and the sudden silence as TJ Oshie won an engrossing shootout will stick in the memory.
Likewise the roar that greeted a Russian victory in the 5,000m speed skating relay in the Iceberg Skating Palace. Those who feared the venues would lack for atmosphere were proved definitively wrong.
From a British point of view, it was the pure joy of an unexpected snowboard slopestyle bronze for Jenny Jones in a sport that really imposed itself on the Games over its opening weekend and felt like a breath of fresh air after all the paranoia of the build-up. As she collapsed in hysterics, her watching team-mates – including Lizzy Yarnold – said it set the tone for their Games.
Worst moment?
Aside from arriving at my hotel room at 3am to find it had yet to be finished, it had to be Elise Christie taking her third tumble in the 1,000m short-track speed skating semi-final. Throughout her travails, she had remained honest and self-aware in the mixed zone and, with a redemptive medal a real possibility, was undone by the vagaries of her thrilling sport.
In a similar fashion, it was hard not to sympathise with 15-year-old Russian Yulia Lipnitskaya, who fell on the ice with the weight of her country's expectations on her shoulders. Afterwards, as her coach turned away, she looked crushed.
Funniest moment?
The reaction of snowboarder Billy Morgan, who may have finished only 10th but enjoyed these Games to the maximum, when a colleague in the mixed zone wondered if his run had not been a bit, well, conservative. "Conservative?!" he spluttered with faux indignation, as you might if you'd just performed a series of gravity-defying jumps and spins on a vertiginous course and were then faced with a gaggle of journalists new to the sport whose only experience of a triple was in the bar.
Best tumble?
Best is not the right word, but the audible gasp that went around the Iceberg when Lipnitskaya fell during her Schindler's List skating routine could be heard in Moscow. More entertainingly, the photofinish in the men's ski-cross quarter-final, when three competitors – the Russian Egor Korotkov narrowly beating Sweden's Victor Oehling Norber and Finland's Jouni Pellinen – slid over the line together on the seat of their pants, provided one of the images of the Games and summed up the wackily entertaining appeal of ski-cross.
Best hair?
"Best" might be a relative term, but the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park did not lack out-there hairdos. The British freestyle skier James "Woodsy" Woods, who may lack an imaginative nickname but is the most polite and engaging man in freestyle skiing, sported a particularly impressive effort. But Norway's Magnus Krog topped him by dyeing his hair red, white and blue, bringing some colour to the normally more staid world of cross-country skiing.
Best trick?
The all-American ski slopestyle trio, who swept the podium on a sunny Saturday under cloudless blue skies, took some beating for the range and consistency of their gravity-defying routines. But there can be only one winner: iPod's "yolo". The Russian-born Swiss Iouri "iPod" Podladtchikov deposed the reigning snowboarding halfpipe champion Shaun White by landing the signature trick that he himself invented. White tried to copy it but failed, allowing the younger man to defeat him. After getting his medal, iPod put his own spin on the Sochi slogan: "It's hot, it's cool and it's fucking mine." He then gave a rambling, goofy press conference that took in Kate Moss and photography.
Most memorable kit?
Obvious, maybe, but there cannot be any contender other than Norway's curling trousers. Garish one day, unspeakably loud the next, the joke never wore thin. Though they couldn't help looking slightly incongruous when the bitter reality of sport left them describing their devastation following their last-ditch loss to David Murdoch's British rink in their play-off while wearing clown pants. Russia's omnipresent garish kit was also memorable, for all the wrong reasons.
Top tweet?
If London was a social media Games among those attending, this felt like the first where the participating athletes refused to be disconnected from their laptops and smartphones too – particularly in the new freestyle skiing and snowboarding disciplines. Many of the Brits used Twitter and Instagram to document their Games experience with an endless stream of selfies, never more memorably than when Rowan Cheshire used hers to first show the extent of her injuries after a training accident on the halfpipe, and then to document the hospital visits from team-mates that showed she was OK.
Source: The Guardian
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