For 2018 Winter Games, Pyeongchang has a different plan in place

In 2018, the indoor ice sports will be in Gangneung, a northeastern coastal city of about 230,000.

The sun was shining once more by the Black Sea, and the jackets were off with the Olympic flame still a few hours away from being extinguished. “You better bring your jacket to Pyeongchang,” said Kim Jin-sun, head of the organizing committee for the 2018 Games in South Korea. “Much colder than Sochi.”

As the Russians and the members of the International Olympic Committee begin recovering from the sleepless nights that surely accompanied their wild, seven-year ride to Sochi’s closing ceremony, the cosmic question is this: Where do the Winter Games go from here in a world of climate instability, declining winter sports participation numbers in the West and spiraling costs and scale for Olympic organizers?

For now, all that is clear is that the next Games are going to Pyeongchang, long the leading destination for winter sports in South Korea and now eager to challenge Japan for that role in East Asia.

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The good news for those who still cannot wrap their head around Sochi’s reported total expenditure of $51 billion – trains, roads and gondolas included – is that Pyeongchang does not need to build everything from scratch.

It already has five of its 13 venues, and a different plan. As has become fashionable, the 2018 Games will be a two-cluster affair: with the indoor ice sports in the city and the snow and sliding sports in the mountains. But the difference in Pyeongchang’s case is that the mountain sites are taking the lead in symbolic and practical terms.

In 2018, the indoor ice sports will be in Gangneung, a northeastern coastal city of about 230,000. But the focal point in terms of identity will be Pyeongchang, the more lightly populated nearby county where the mountain sites will be based and which will also be the site of the opening and closing ceremonies.

One of the first orders of business will be to try to halt the flood of phonetically challenged Westerners who continue to confuse Pyeongchang with the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.

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Mutual development of both countries is a hopeful prospect, and so – in a much more minor key — is Pyeongchang’s centralized attempt to put the accent on atmosphere. Kim said he expects full venues because of local enthusiasm and relatively easy access from Seoul’s capital.

“The finish areas of the venues are very close to the ski resort,” he said. “So we think we can create the Olympic atmosphere there, and the Seoul metropolitan area, with 25 million, will be one hour away by the high-speed railway and one and a half hours by car on the new expressway.”

As future Olympics approach, the I.O.C. needs to reconsider whether it truly wants to raise the sociopolitical bar to hosting the Games: creating even clearer language about discrimination or freedoms or transparency. But after all the effort, most of it not by Vladimir V. Putin, it seemed churlish to emphasiSe the negative Sunday night as the athletes and officials and even a few fans streamed out of the gold medal hockey game onto the new esplanade to snap photos of the sun setting over the Black Sea.

There was a Russian girl, no more than 8, wrapped tightly in a Canadian flag. There were young Russian women with Canadian flags painted on one cheek and Swedish flags on the other. Everywhere there were people laughing, posing, enjoying (and smoking).

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The palm trees by the shore were soon silhouetted against an orange sky, underscoring once more that this was an outside-the-box Winter Olympics. It was also a polarizing Winter Olympics: one that like a classic Russian novel was brimming with darkness and light and all the shades in between.

Next fascinating subject: Pyeongchang. Don’t forget to bring a warmer jacket.