SOCHI, Russia — The sun was shining once more by the Black Sea and the jackets were off with the Olympic flame still a few hours from being extinguished.

“You better bring your jacket to Pyeongchang,” said Kim Jin-sun, head of the organizing committee for the 2018 Winter 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 where 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.

The good news for those who still cannot wrap their head around Sochi’s purported 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 Pyeonchang’s case is that the mountain venues are taking the lead in symbolic and practical terms.

Since Lillehammer, Norway, staged its postcard Winter Olympics in 1994, with locals riding their kick sleds through the quaint, snowy streets, the official host cities for the Winter Games have all been of significant size: Nagano, Japan, in 1998; Salt Lake City in 2002; Turin, Italy, in 2006; Vancouver, British Columbia, in 2010; and now Sochi.

In 2018, the indoor ice sports will be staged 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 venues 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.

“Hopefully I will stop explaining that I am not working for North Korea,” Stratos Safioleas, a consultant with Pyeongchang, wrote on Twitter on Monday.

Gangwon once formed a single province with Kangwon province, which now lies on the other side of the North Korean border. Kim is well aware that the proximity to his politically unstable neighbor will not pass unnoticed.

“I understand such concerns from the Western world, but you know South Korea and North Korea, the Korean Peninsula have been divided over the past 60-70 years, and the situation is the same at the moment,” he said.

He pointed to South Korea’s successful staging of major sporting events like the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, the 2002 World Cup of soccer, and the 2011 world athletics championships.

“This situation hasn’t posed any threat to such mega events, so we are not concerned about this,” he said. “Overall, personally, I believe the inter-Korean relationship will be further advanced going forward to realize peace on the Korean Peninsula and to achieve mutual development.”

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

“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 11⁄2 hours by car on the new expressway.”

Atmosphere was not Sochi’s strength, though it does deserve plenty of credit. Its venues were generally eye-catching and innovative. Its security plan — the most important element based on established threats — clearly worked and was not overly intrusive. Its young cadre of volunteers kept smiling and hustling throughout (and were still smiling Monday). Its transport system worked better than any other in recent memory at a Winter Olympics, in part because the transit times were short and the transits uncomplicated.

Enthusiasm, as is typical, snowballed as the finish line loomed, helped along by Russia’s surprisingly strong performance that led to finishing atop the medal table for the first time since the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Russia’s 13 gold medals and total of 33 medals were no coincidence but rather the result of a well-organized and well-financed plan that made use of both foreign and Russian coaching talent.

The Russian team’s success in Sochi almost — almost — compensated for the men’s hockey team’s failing to reach the medal round.

But there was still a lack of vibrancy and Olympic-worthy ambiance in many venues, particularly in the mountains, and also a lack of a true gathering point there for communion and celebration. Alpine skiing is not a traditional focal point for Russia, and it often felt that way in Rosa Khutor.

Down below, by the Black Sea, the ambience in the Winter Olympic Park ranged from festive and raucous to sterile and empty enough to give one a strong sense of what this vast, resolutely heterogeneous complex could look like if the legacy plan is not expertly and creatively managed.