Russias dirty little secret: The Winter Olympics arent actually in Sochi

After the opulent sporting venues, hundreds of box hotels, the freshly built amusement park, the new roads and train lines, the colorful, if questionable, brick boardwalk along the Black Sea, and the waterfront "McMansions" (strangely unoccupied) after all of that the first thing you notice in Adler are the fences.

The fences are everywhere.

They are a metallic construct with a stonewall design on the bottom and five wide, brown, faux-wood slats rising up to about eight feet. They line roads, run along back alleys and sometimes fence in other fences.

Government contractors threw them up all over the place, locals say, to keep tourist eyes from seeing what's behind them: construction sites, swamp, poverty in other words, Adler.

These are officially the Sochi Olympics, but the games are not being played in Sochi. They are happening in unheralded Adler, technically a microdistrict (in Russian city planning parlance) of Sochi, its larger neighbour up the coast.

Adler is the town the Olympics ignore and the Russians prefer you not see behind the fences. Yet it is especially the area south of Olympic Park the center of Vladimir Putin's big, bold bet to turn this sleepy village, once mostly swampland hard by the closed border of Abkhazia, into an international vacation destination.

Adler is very much its own world, different from Sochi, whose city centre takes two buses and a 45-minute train ride to reach. That is if you can afford the train. Many here can't. Then it's two hours by bus, they say.

Putin promised the International Olympic Committee that if it awarded Russia the 2014 Winter Games, he would essentially construct a new city to host them. He estimated he had just 10 percent to 15 percent of the infrastructure.

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Russias dirty little secret: The Winter Olympics arent actually in Sochi