SOCHI 2014 WINTER OLYMPICS
GREAT BRITAIN holds high hopes of achieving its best Winter Olympics result in decades at the controversial Games which officially begin today in Sochi.
The British team - or Team GB as it is better known - features genuine medal contenders in skeleton, curling, snowboarding, and short-track speed skating as well as further hopes in freestyle skiing and at a bobsleigh meet which will also feature Jamaica.
Never mind Cool Runnings, though - from a historical perspective, any British success would be a bit of a turn up for the books in a competition historically dominated by North America, Russia, and the Alpine and Scandanavian countries.
After all, Britain has only won more than one medal at three post-war Games, and has failed to win any at all on six occasions.
The last triple haul came at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Nazi Germany in 1936 while, Britain's best performance was back in the very first Winter Olympics in 1924. In those first Games, in Chamonix, France, Britain won four medals - one gold, a silver and two bronzes.
Remarkably, that total stands a chance of being beaten - at least, according to UK Sport, the high performance funding agency, which has set a target of between three and seven podium finishes.
However, long-time readers of this blog may recall me writing of similar expectations four years ago for the Games at Whistler near Vancouver in Canada.
As it turned out, Britain came away with only one medal - though it was a gold - from Amy Williams as she became Team GB's first individual Winter Olympic champion for 30 years by winning in skeleton.
The 'tea-tray' sport again provides perhaps Britain's best chance for success this time too, with 2006 Olympic silver medallist Shelley Rudman competing as the reigning world champion and Lizzy Yarnold recently winning the season-long World Cup title.
In the more sedate - but no less competitive - sport of curling, both the women and men's teams are very much in the running.
The women, coached by 2002 Olympic champion Rhona Martin, are skippered by Eve Muirhead and head to Sochi Winter Olympics as the reigning world champions after success in Riga last year.
Meanwhile, David Murdoch skippers the men, still looking to break his Olympic duck despite having won two world and three European titles in his career.
On the slopes, Jenny Jones and Billy Morgan should be competitive in the snowboarding while, in the freestyle skiing, teenager Katie Summerhayes and 20-year-old James Woods could post incredible early career markers.
Short-track speed skater Elise Christie won European gold in the 1000m last month and the four-man bobsleighers were silver-medallists at their European Championships, as well as at a World Cup event in Lake Placid.
So, there we go, then. Plenty of chances over the next 17 days for this to be a memorable Games for Britain.
For Russia, and president Vladimir Putin, the importance of these Winter Olympics simply cannot be understated. Putin's reputation is effectively on the line, the event having come at a cost of $51bn.
Already, though, Sochi 2014 has been making the headlines for all the wrong reasons.
Anti-gays laws, brought in last summer, banned the promotion of homosexuality to children, something which seems completely out of kilter with the Olympic charter.
Principle Six of the charter reads: "Any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement."
And yet, despite a shocking Channel 4 Dispatches documentary exposing the everyday persecution of gay people in Russia, the Games remain there.
Stephen Fry wrote an open letter in August calling for a boycott of Sochi 2014, stating an absolute ban was "simply essential".
It would surely be better, though, if the issue could be highlighted during the course of a Games.
The old cliche that sport and politics do not mix is certainly one of the most hackneyed in the book. Perhaps, in an ideal world, they should not - but they always have and always will.
Therefore, it must be hoped there there will be a moment just as powerful as the 'Black Power' salutes of Tommie Smith and John Carlos after they won medals in the 200m at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico.
Demonstrations and protests, organised in 19 cities across the globe including in Downing Street, London, are a good start, and it is commendable to see a big firm like Google make its point.
But how much more remarkable would it be if there was something done in Sochi itself - and how shameful would it be if the Russian authorities clamped down on it.
Coming away from that issue, and there have also been significant fears about a terrorist attack striking at the event following three recent bombings in the city of Volgograd which killed 42.
Ex-CIA boss Mike Morrell has even described the Games as being "the most dangerous Olympics ever", though his world view can hardly be described as an unbiased one.
Instead, the athletes and spectators should be reassured by Sochi's 'ring of steel' of approximately 100,000 police, security agents and army troops.
If anything, and without wanting to tempt fate, it seems to me as if these Games will be particularly difficult to disrupt.
The last of the worries from the hosts is with regards to the actual performance of the Russian team.
The Soviet Union dominated the Winter Olympics to such an extent that, between 1956 and 1988, it failed to finish top of the medal table just twice - in 1968 and 1984, finishing second on both occasions.
A Unified Team in 1992 also finished second before the Russians finished top in 1994 without the assistance of medals from the other ex-Soviet republics.
Since then, though, performance has slipped to such an extent that only three gold medals were won at Vancouver in 2010 as the Russians ended up ranked 11th.
In the hockey, neither the men or the women's team even made it to the semis, with the men humiliated 7-3 in their quarter final against Canada.
A similar performance level across all the sports simply will not do for Russia or Putin - though it would be only natural to expect an improvement from a host nation.
One of the most wonderful things about the Winter Olympics, however, is that the snow and ice makes the sports so much more unpredictable than the summer event.
Just witness how this gold medal was won by Australian speed skater Steven Bradbury in the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City.
Hopefully, fortune will favour the British team over the next two-and-a-bit weeks and my review blog at the end of the month charts some significant success.
In the meantime, the results of all of the events and a medal table will be recorded on this page here - except for the team sports of hockey or curling, which are here.
The full list of Team GB members at Sochi 2014 is:
Alpine Skiing (m) David Ryding (w) Chemmy Alcott
Biathlon (m) Lee Jackson (w) Amanda Lightfoot
Bobsleigh (m) Ben Simons, Stuart Benson, John Jackson, Bruce Tasker, Craig Pickering, Joel Fearon, John Baines, Lamin Deen (w) Paula Walker, Rebekah Wilson
Cross-country skiing Andrew Young, Andrew Musgrave, Callum Smith, Rosamund Musgrave
Curling (m) David Murdoch, Greg Drummond, Michael Goodfellow, Scott Andrews, Tom Brewster
Curling (w) Eve Muirhead, Anna Sloan, Claire Hamilton, Lauren Gray, Vicki Adams
Figure skating (pairs) David King, Stacey Kemp (mixed) Nick Buckland, Penny Coomes (m) Matthew Parr (w) Jenna McCorkell
Freestyle skiing Murray Buchan, James Woods, James Machon, Emma Lonsdale, Katie Summerhayes, Rowan Cheshire
Short track speed skating (m) Jack Whelbourne, Jon Eley, Richard Shoebridge (w) Elise Christie, Charlotte Gilmartin
Skeleton (m) Kristan Bromley, Dominic Parson (w) Shelley Rudman, Lizzy Yarnold
Snowboarding (m) Jamie Nicholls, Dom Harrington, Billy Morgan, Ben Kilner (w) Zoe Gillings, Aimee Fuller, Jenny Jones
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