Coca-Cola’s Showcase Pavilion for the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics has opened.
The official opening was performed by Alexander Zhukov - president of the Russian Olympic Committee, Muhtar Kent - Coca-Cola chairman and CEO, Thomas Bach - the president of the International Olympic Committee and Dmitry Kozak - deputy prime minister of the Russian Federation.
Coca-Cola is kicking off a four-year initiative to promote healthy lifestyles in Russia, using the 2014 Sochi Olympic Winter Games as the starting point for a mobile platform that will reach communities across Russia with the message that "Movement is Happiness."
The Coca-Cola Active Healthy Living Showcase, housed in a structure designed and built by Tectoniks, is a branded mobile exhibition that actively and positively promotes active healthy living while also engaging consumers with the brand. It was installed in the Olympic Park in January and will remain there for the duration of the games.
“This is the beginning of a journey,” Kent said at the inauguration ceremony, “to have a working, active healthy living program with partners in every country where we do business.”
The showcase consists of two specially designed domes. One houses the Sochi 2014 Olympic Torch and chronicles the history of the Coca-Cola system, along with beverage ingredient facts, the history of Russia, and the intersection of history and sports. The second is an interactive exhibit encouraging visitors to become active at home, in the street, and at sport facilities.
Coca-Cola expects to welcome at least 80,000 guests to the showcase during the Sochi Olympic Games. Once they conclude on Feb. 23, the traveling experience will embark on a four-year tour of the country to motivate local communities to pursue a more active lifestyle leading up to the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia.
Coca-Cola Russia has launched a website, www.v-dvizhenii.com, where visitors can learn about various physical activities through educational video lessons featuring Olympic champions, prominent athletes and youth community leaders. Visitors can invite friends to participate, as well as generate and share their own content. The overall journey in Dome 2 of the Coca-Cola showcase is a live replica of the website, representing three areas of basic exercising: at home, outdoors, and in sport facilities. Fans who visit the showcase can have their photo taken with the Olympic Torch, then download the images on the website.
Coca-Cola is the oldest continuous sponsor of the Olympics, having been an official partner of the Games since the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam.
This year’s Sochi 2014 Torch Relay was the largest Olympic Torch Relay, to date. The flame reached new highs and lows as part of its Sochi expedition. It travelled to the North Pole aboard a Russian nuclear-powered icebreakers, sunk to the bottom of the world’s deepest lake, Lake Baikal, climbed Mount Elbrus, the highest mountain in Russia, and blasted off into space aboard the Russian “Soyuz” rocket from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
Tectoniks also supplied two Coca-Cola branded domes for the torch relay.