Flushed with pride after a spectacular showing at the costliest Olympics ever, Russia celebrates 17 days of sport-driven global unity on Sunday night with a farewell show that hands off the Winter Games to their next host, Pyeongchang in South Korea.
The closing ceremony, a farewell from Russia with love, pageantry and protocol, starts at 20:14 local time precisely a nod to the year that President Vladimir Putin seized upon to remake Russia's image with the Olympics' power to wow and concentrate global attention and massive resources.
Its $51 billion investment, topping even Beijing's estimated $40 billion layout for the 2008 Summer Games, transformed a decaying resort town on the Black Sea into a household name. All-new facilities, unthinkable in the Soviet era of drab shoddiness, showcased how far Russia has come in the two decades since it turned its back on communism.
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But the Olympic show didn't win over critics of Russia's backsliding on democracy and human rights under Putin and its institutionalised intolerance of gays.
Despite some bumps along the way, Thomas Bach is expected to use the closing ceremony to deliver an upbeat verdict on the games, his first as International Olympic Committee president. One of Sochi's big successes was security. Feared attacks by Islamic militants who had threatened to target the games didn't materialise.
"It's amazing what has happened here," Bach said a few hours before the ceremony. He recalled that Sochi was an "old, Stalinist-style sanatorium city" when he visited for the IOC in the 1990s.
"You entered the room and you were looking at the roof so you would not be hit by something falling down," he said.
The ceremony will feature the extinguishing of the Olympic flame. Day and night, it became a favourite backdrop for "Sochi selfies," a buzzword born at these games for the fad of athletes and spectators taking DIY souvenir photos of themselves.
