but beyond corruption allegations, economist andrew zimbalist says the host structure is bigger and more valuable than the games. >> creating a 12 month a year tourist town out of a small summer resort in sochi. so it involves road transportation. it involves communications infrastructure. it involves rail infrastructure. all connecting sochi to the surrounding mountains and also connecting sochi to moscow via rail, and a very vast expansion of the sochi international airport. >> and as zimbalist points out, there are long term costs that we can't see. >> some of sochi's earlier charm as a kind of bucolic black sea resort might have been destroyed by all of the construction. and we know residents are saying there is so much pollution in the water now they can't swim in it anymore. so it's very hard in a general case for any of the previous hosts of either the winter or summer games to claim that these paid off economically, in the sense they created infrastructure needed for long term development, or in the sense that they've awakened the world to this area in ways they didn't know about