Sochi 2014: The highs, the lows and the haircuts

Best moment?
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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Sochi closing ceremony: Games end with flourish as protest fears melt away

His ice hockey team failed to follow the script. But just about everything else went to plan for a watching Vladimir Putin as Russia celebrated a rush of medals in Sochi with a triumphant closing ceremony on the shores of the Black Sea.

After spending $51bn (£31bn) to build a mountain ski resort and a cluster of shimmering sports venues from scratch not to mention the roads and railways to link them failure was not an option for the omnipresent Russian president.

At the opening ceremony a fortnight ago, all the talk was of security fears, culls of stray dogs, last-minute glitches and a giant hydraulic snowflake that failed to open.

But by the closing ceremony which featured ballet from the Bolshoi, music by Rachmaninov and tributes to Tolstoy and Kandinsky plus the usual protocol the atmosphere was one of pure celebration swathed in the colours of the Russian flag. International Olympic Committee president, Thomas Bach, declared the most expensive Games in history "a real special experience". He also personally thanked Putin for his contribution to the "extraordinary success of these Winter Games".

The organisers could even afford to laugh at themselves. The early part of the ceremony featured a knowing nod to the failed snowflake, with a shimmering shoal of dancers making up four of the five rings, before belatedly forming the fifth.

The opening ceremony had been a pleasingly offbeat romp through Russian art and culture. With its marching bands and 1,000-strong children's choir singing the national anthem, this was more of a traditional show of strength.

For the Russians who wildly cheered a clean sweep of the podium in the 50km cross country skiing and a second gold in the bobsleigh for Alexander Zubkov on the final day of competition, a surge of sporting success helped it go with a swing.

The Russian ice hockey team had limped out of the competition to Finland at the quarter-final stage, leaving Canada to triumph over Sweden in Sunday's final.

But Russia, who finished an abject 11th in the medal table in Vancouver four years ago, have poured tens of billions of roubles into ensuring they weren't humiliated at their own party.

As in London, a raft of medals for hometown favourites, a tribe of 25,000 helpful volunteers and a well-judged but extensive security operation buoyed the mood.

"The success of the home team is always an important part of the success of the Games overall. This we saw just two years ago with Team GB in London," said Bach.

The Russian deputy prime minister had earlier said the huge price tag had been worth it and claimed that the Games had helped rebrand his country in the eyes of the world.

"The friendly faces, the warm Sochi sun and the glare of the Olympic gold have broken the ice of scepticism towards the new Russia," insisted Dmitry Kozak. "The Games have turned our country, its culture and the people into something that is a lot closer and more appealing and understandable for the rest of the world."

When the Russian team paraded into the stadium to huge cheers and chants of "Russ-ee-aa", even Putin allowed himself a thin smile.

They also had a little help from overseas. The Korean-born speed skater Viktor Ahn, who switched nationality in 2011, won three golds and US-born snowboarder Vic Wild, who acquired Russian citizenship through marriage in 2012, won two.

Not that anyone in the packed Fisht Stadium seemed to care, after the hosts finished the Games with a total of 33 medals, 13 of them gold.

The gold medallist Lizzy Yarnold led a 56-strong team of British athletes that also met expectations, equalling their best ever medal haul of four in 1924.

Billy Morgan, a snowboarder and former acrobat who is one of a clutch of "fridge kids" who have captured the imagination at these Games, flipped his way into the arena in his Team GB tracksuit.

The build-up had been beset by a cocktail of security fears, human rights concerns and unease about the huge cost. They did not go away entirely. Images of Pussy Riot being whipped by Cossack guards while performing a song called Putin Will Teach You How to Love the Motherland in front of the Olympic logo will linger. On the penultimate day, a coalition of 33 human rights groups wrote to the IOC calling on it to demand higher standards of its host cities. But the predicted podium protests failed to materialise and Bach insisted on the closing day that athletes had not been leaned on.

"The Games are not about political disagreements. They are not about political confrontation," said the German, overseeing his first Games as president.

As three giant animatronic mascots and a cast of hundreds of children extinguished the Olympic flame, amid the traditional fireworks, the debate over whether the Games have been worth the huge investment required to build a new city from scratch was only just beginning.

The Russians say they have uses for each of the glittering sports palaces built by the Black Sea and hope Sochi, with its new mountain resort and port, will become a destination for tourists and conferences in summer and winter.

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