Much has been made of how unprepared Sochi, Russia, seems to be on the day before it will start hosting the Winter Olympics, and by all accounts, the city does indeed appear unready.
Reporters have said their hotels are still being built, and have shown photos of yellow-brown water that spouts from their sinks. Photos coming out of Sochi in the past few weeks displayed plenty of buildings still under construction, and there has been an outcry over news that Sochi city hall hired a pest control firm to kill around 2,000 stray dogs strolling around the city in order to maintain a clean image. #SochiProblems is all over Twitter.
See also: Sochi Olympics Off to Rough Start Before They Even Begin
Those are all sure signs that Sochi has some work to do before tomorrow's opening ceremony, but the city will be far from the first Olympic venue to be making last-minute, sometimes controversial decisions leading up to the games.
Let's start with the uproar over the dog cull. Trying to poison 2,000 dogs is always going to generate harsh criticism, but Sochi is not the first to employ such a tactic in order to clean up the Olympic streets, and this cull is far from the worst.
Before the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, Chinese officials tried to rid the streets of some 200,000 cats in much the same way. Four years earlier, in Athens, Greece, officials set out to kill 15,000 stray dogs — over seven times the number of animals reportedly running around Sochi.
The Athens Olympic Games were also beset with construction delays, pushing workers to paint and hammer away almost up until the event began. Two weeks before the London Olympics, in 2012, construction was going on all over the place.
Six years earlier, at the Turin, Italy, Olympics, workers were also rushing to finish up a bunch of buildings. Four years after that, at the Vancouver, Canada, Games, officials seemed to think of everything except the need for snow. The white stuff had to be trucked in from elsewhere due to unseasonably warm weather, and this caused a panic about whether many of the sports could go on.
And digging back into the last century, not much appears to be different.
When Lake Placid, N.Y., hosted the 1980 games, fans couldn't get to the events they wanted to watch. Spectators were asked to buy tickets to alpine sports on-site, but then weren't allowed on the site without a ticket.
Security was a concern at the Atlanta, Ga., games months before the Olympics began, yet a bomb exploded at Centennial Olympic Park during the events.
For its part, Sochi has already been the target of a credible terrorist threat before the games have begun. In response, officials have supplied tens of thousands of additional security personnel in an effort to keep the games secure. On what is perhaps the most important aspect of the games, it seems officials have taken preparation seriously.
These Olympics will continue to be scrutinized, perhaps most especially for the unique environmental impact all the construction has had on Sochi. But whether all the additional negative attention is or is not deserved, many of Sochi's problems are not new, and they don't appear to correlate to how successful the games will be.
Maybe we'll all look back and see this as foreshadowing of a terrible two weeks. And yet, maybe after the athletes have competed and the medals have been doled out, #SochiProblems will be long forgotten.
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