With corruption, pervasiveness matters; but sheer scale counts as well. Depending on exactly what costs you include and how creative your accountants are, the London Fiasco cost somewhere between 10 and 15 billion dollars. Sochi, in present estimate (quite possibly before all the cool surprises come out, if past projects are anything to go by) is at 50 billion.
Given that even the most corrupt olympics have, so far, ended up delivering actual infrasturcture, there is a ceiling on how much money you can just ‘lose’ before you actually have to half-ass some stadia for the cameras. Given the disparity in price, Sochi could probably lose London’s entire price tag to corruption before they have to get off their asses and actually build something. That doesn’t imply that the Russian Character is intrinsically more tainted than the English(G4S alone helped keep that competition open); but quantity has a quality all its own. So long as you are actually on the hook to deliver an event, you can only steal so much and still have enough to kick the event off. The larger the budget, the more latitude for morally dubious creativity…
