LAUSANNE, Switzerland, June 22 (RIA Novosti) - Russia's Black Sea resort of Sochi has been named alongside two other cities as an official candidate to host the 2014 Olympic Winter Games.
Sochi will vie with Austria's Salzberg and South Korea's PyeongChang in a three-way race to decide who hosts the games after the result was announced Thursday by the International Olympic Committee.
Vyacheslav Fetisov, the head of the Russian Federal Agency for Physical Culture and Sport, said the nomination was only a first step, and that a lot of work remained.
"We will work," he said. "Everything is still ahead. We are one of the three [cities] and we already have good chances; we will do our best."
Sochi bid for the 1998 and 2002 Winter Olympics, but failed to win the right to host the Games largely because of its poor-quality Soviet-era infrastructure.
Last week Russian Economic Development and Trade Minster German Gref said that the government would allocate unprecedented 190 billion rubles ($7.01 billion) for Sochi if it won the right to host the 2014 Winter Olympics.
Four other cities had initially also bid for the XXII Olympic Winter Games: Almaty, Kazakhstan; Borjomi, Georgia; Jaca, Spain; and Sofia, Bulgaria.
The winning city in the remaining trio for the 2014 event will be unveiled in July 2007 in Guatemala City.
Sochi Mayor Viktor Kolodyazhny said there was a year left before the winning city would be announced and that work would be continued on a program for Sochi's development.
A federal program for Sochi, unveiled by Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov in March, aims to transform the Black Sea resort, already a popular destination for thousands of vacationing Russians, into a world-class sports venue by building new facilities and modernizing old ones.
"Sochi's bid to host the 2014 Olympics and Paralympics is more than a bid of a one city," Zhukov said in Lausanne after the three candidate cities were announced. "This is the bid from all of Russia, which is a country with great accomplishments in winter sports but which has never had the honor of hosting the Winter Olympics."
