When you have loads of foreign reporters and the eyes of the world desend on an single, isolated area, it behooves you to make sure that they have nothing worthwhile to report.
Which is really not that hard, when you consider the big picture.
They could have dialed down on fancy pants BS, focused on the details and clean up one town in plenty of time and no one would be all that wiser if other things got neglected in the rest of Russia.
At the least, stick the reporters in the decent hotels and leave the crappy, unfinished, sticky with semen ones for the tourist and fans.