• Soft power
• hard power
• Russia
• Olympic Games
• Sochi 2014
• Putin

In the last 40 years, the “Great Sporting Events” such as Olympic Games have gained increasing popularity and, at the same time, increased international importance. The geographical space where major sporting events take place is not a passive container of such performances, on the contrary, the territorialization of mega-events is an expression of political, economic, and cultural interests. Although their duration is ephemeral, they have a very significant impact on a local, regional and global scale. Countries compete to host these events to obtain greater visibility, improve their infrastructure, attract tourist flows, and ultimately, achieve a territorial projection on a regional and global scale. Olympic Games as an instrument of state soft power politics: the case of Winter Olympic Games Sochi 2014 is a work of research that describes how was the international behavior of Russia in the role of the organizer of the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympic Games and the consequent use of such great event in foreign policy, with the ultimate aim of standing out politically on the international scene.