Brazil might not know who its president will be in eight months’ time, and Olympic athletes will not have TVs in their rooms because of the country’s recession, but Rio de Janeiro is still promising “spectacular” Olympic Games next year.
With its budget in tatters because of the economic crisis and the nation shamed by not cleaning pathogenic sewage from Guanabara Bay — the Rio venue for Olympic regattas — criticism has been rife.
Organizers have preferred to stress that the work to host next year’s Aug. 5 to Aug. 21 Olympic Games and 10,000 athletes from 206 countries has been without delays, and improvements to Rio’s public transport network are to be a lasting legacy.
“Rio today is 80 percent ready, in April it will be 100 percent, and during the Games it will be 120 percent,” Rio organizing committee communications director Mario Andrada said in an interview with reporters.
“The Olympics are going to be spectacular,” he added.
Unsaid is the organizers’ hope that the political chaos in South America’s biggest country, wrought by the threat of impeachment for deeply unpopular Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff over allegedly fiddled public accounts, will be settled by then, or that at least anti-government discontent will not spill out into the streets as it did in 2013, a year before Brazil hosted the FIFA World Cup.
Faced with its worst recession in decades, double-digit inflation, swelling unemployment and a corruption scandal sinking the state oil company Petrobras, the Rio committee has pledged to spend only “the money we have,” Andrada said.
That means slashing 5 percent to 20 percent from the US$5 billion budget; for example, by not installing TVs in athletes’ rooms, getting by with fewer printers and offering Brazilian meat-beans-and-rice dishes to invited VIPs instead of fancy meals.
“The country is going through an enormous crisis. We can’t be sending out a different message, [or] leaving debts to be paid by the government, or worse, by society,” Andrada said.
However, Rio is to cut back “nothing from the tracks, nothing from the sports, nothing from the ceremony, nothing from the legacy.”
After the Paris attacks in which Muslim extremists killed 130 people, Brazil is to oversee the biggest integrated security operation in its history: 85,000 police, soldiers and agents, in coordination with 80 countries.
“We are constantly working as if a threat were imminent,” Brazilian Intelligence Agency Director-General Wilson Trezza told reporters.
The Rio committee also assured that “Rio will be the safest city in the world during the Games.”
However, there have been some unsettling security issues of late, such as the breaking up of a ring producing falsified birth certificates that allowed dozens of Syrians to obtain Brazilian passports between 2012 and last year. Several of the Syrians are still fugitives.
However, beyond the security, what many in Rio — dubbed “the marvelous city,” but over the past few years converted into a giant construction site — want to know is, will it be a better place to live after the Olympics?
Lamartine Pereira da Costa, an Olympic Games expert at Rio de Janeiro State University, believes the answer is yes, based on the urban improvements seen in Barcelona after it hosted the 1992 Games.
“Things here work so badly that they can’t get any worse,” he said. “For example, the percentage of the population using public transport will go from 38 percent to 66 percent after the Games — it’s the great achievement of Rio de Janeiro.”
However, the People’s Committee for the World Cup and the Olympics, a citizens’ group critical of the Games, predicted that Rio will end up more “segregated” afterward. It pointed to the forced relocation of more than 4,000 families to make room for Olympic works; skyrocketing real-estate prices benefiting only a handful of wealthy businessmen; insufficient and inefficient transport; and a violent and racist police force.
“This will be an Olympiad of exclusion,” said Orlando Santos Jr, a university professor coordinating the group’s efforts.
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