Anyone who has watched an Olympics whose vision is sharp will notice that the logo for Sochi 2014 — which appears in every stadium, on every ticket, and on tens of millions of dollars’ worth of Olympic merchandise — is remarkably different from those of previous Olympics. It contains no drawing and features only unassuming lowercase lettering, the five Olympic rings, and a web address.

Guo Chunning, who designed the “Dancing Beijing” logo for the Beijing 2008 Games, has researched the history of Olympic logos going back to the beginning of the modern Games, in 1896. He believes that, with the exception of Mexico City 1968 and London 2012, this is the first time a logo has lacked drawn elements. (Mexico City and London, however, used lettering that resembled artwork.)

Olympic logos, once chosen, aren’t always greeted with applause. When the London 2012 logo was revealed, in 2007 — having cost four hundred thousand pounds, or eight hundred thousand dollars, to create—a petition circulated in Great Britain that was signed by more than forty-eight thousand people to have the logo scrapped and redesigned. The effort never gained traction.

While the Sochi logo hasn’t generated a groundswell of opposition, some felt that an alternate design, by the Moscow firm Studio Transformer, would have been more in tune with the Olympic tradition.

What do you think? Left or right?