BBC News, 21
January 2014
Related
Stories
The photo was tweeted on Monday |
The picture
from the Biathlon Centre tweeted by Moscow correspondent Steve Rosenberg was
picked up by opposition leader Alexei Navalny among others.
Mr Navalny
queried how the budget for the games, said to be $50bn (£30bn; 1,700bn
roubles), had been spent.
Elsewhere,
the photo caused disbelief and much hilarity, with some linking it to the
recent debate over gay rights.
"Seeing
double in the Gentlemen's Loo at the Olympic Biathlon Centre," our
correspondent wrote in his original tweet.
Retweeting
the photo, Mr Navalny commented: "This is a men's toilet in a Sochi
Olympics media centre for 1.5bn roubles [£27m; $45m]."
"Two
toilets - 28,000 roubles," wrote another blogger. "Olympic media
centre - 1.5bn roubles. Global embarrassment - priceless."
Others
joked about Russia's controversial law on "gay propaganda", which led
to calls from international campaigners to boycott February's games.
BBC cameraman Max Lomakin snapped these communal toilets at Kazan University |
Noting
there was one toilet roll between two in the cubicle, another tweeter wrote:
"Tear off some paper before you sit down."
The
Biathlon Centre was completed nearly two years ago, with investment from the
Russian state gas company Gazprom.
"The
building is one of the biggest and most comfortable structures of its kind in
the world," a company representative told Russia's Interfax news agency at
the time.
While the
sight of twin toilets is unusual in European parts of Russia, it is not
unknown, as Russian journalist Nikita Likhachev revealed, blogging about the
story for Russian news website Tjournal.
Examples
collected on his blog (in Russian) include facilities apparently to be found in
other sports venues and even restaurants.
One photo
shows a row of planks laid over a pit in a field. "Army toilet" runs
the caption.
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