Does Rio de Janeiro have the guts? The city is now desperately behind schedule for its 2016 Olympics — one insider put it at 10 percent ready, where London was 60 percent done by this stage. Will Rio’s chaotic planners make a virtue of necessity? Could they be the first city to haul the Olympics back from its fixation with money and buildings and restore the spectacle to sports? Could Rio fashion a sensation from a disaster?
The main Olympic Park at Barra da Tijuca was silenced by a strike until recently. The secondary venue at Deodoro is a military base and has not even been started. This month, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in Turkey declared a “critical” situation and demanded that the Brazilian government do something. It set up a committee.
The IOC spokesman, Mark Adams, had to deny rumors of a plan B, to move the Games from Rio altogether, but significantly failed to rule this out, merely saying “at this stage that would be far too premature.”
No one visiting Rio at present can imagine cancellation as anything but devastating. In this fantasy world of prestige, multibillion dollar budgets and white elephants, even a shambles is thought better than cancellation. However, the city could yet seize the initiative. With domestic elections scheduled for October and the Games faced with plummeting domestic support, Brazil’s politicians could plead force majeure, call the IOC’s bluff and stage a slimmed down “austerity” games as did Britain in 1948.
They could abandon the unbuilt cluster at Deodoro, intended for events such as rugby, kayaking and mountain biking. They could cancel some of the IOC’s “fancy Dan” sports such as tennis, golf, sailing and equestrianism, as well as the absurdity of staging a second soccer competition two years after this year’s World Cup. They could slash arena and stadium capacity to what it can already offer, and tell thousands of gilded IOC officials, sponsors and VIPs there will be no luxury apartments, limousines and private traffic lanes — just camping on Copacabana beach.
The catalyst might well be this June’s Olympics-lite, otherwise known as the FIFA World Cup. It is costing Brazil US$4 billion on stadiums alone for 64 matches, plus the same again for associated infrastructure. That is a staggering US$125 million per match. Only generals at war and Swiss sports officials contemplate such obscene spending.
When FIFA secretary-general Jerome Valcke came to inspect preparations last month he professed himself appalled. Two years ago he had warned Brazil to give itself “a kick up the backside.”
His boss, Sepp Blatter, said the place was “the most delayed World Cup since I have been at FIFA.”
They treated Brazil as a badly behaved child.
In truth FIFA was a fool. It had staged the 2010 World Cup in South Africa by the skin of its teeth, the country recouping a mere 10 percent of its US$3 billion outlay. Studies of such big events, financed by their sponsors, invariably estimate huge profits, later declaring little more than “goodwill and reputational gain.”
Brazil’s World Cup spending has been wild from the start. Domestic politics made it increase FIFA’s requirement of eight venues to 12, including new stadiums in Manaus and Brasilia that are not needed locally and may never see more than four soccer matches.
In June last year, the unprecedented occurred, with riots across Brazil advocating against even hosting the tournament. Public support fell from 80 percent when the World Cup was awarded to Brazil in 2007 to under 50 percent now. At the last count, 55 percent of Brazilians think it will harm their economy rather than benefit it. While urban bus fares were being raised, millions of dollars were vanishing into corrupt building contracts. Demonstrators shouting “There will be no World Cup!” fought police.
The protests continued sporadically and last month the army had to invade some of Rio’s favelas to restore some semblance of control as the tournament approaches.
More worrying for Rio is the political backwash on the Olympics. At present, the talk is that if Brazil wins the World Cup, the public may just tolerate the Olympics, but if not, “the Games are dead.” As the city’s famously short-fused Mayor Eduardo Paes recently told the press: “Don’t ever in your life do a World Cup and an Olympic Games at the same time... I am not cut out to be a masochist.”
These big events traumatize a complex modern city. They upset the rhythms of its politics and infrastructure investment. They clear thousands of residents from their homes and virtually close down entire cities for a month. IOC plutocrats arrive like visiting princelings long accustomed to living at the expense of others. In London, they demanded and got exclusive limousine lanes, including outside Harrods, and traffic lights switched to green as they drove to their venues. They block-booked luxury hotels and dumped unwanted rooms on to the market when it was too late for resale. Their sponsors demanded the removal of rival advertisements anywhere near the venues, even on toilet equipment. They expected some 40,000 security staff to be on hand, or four times the number of athletes, to protect “the Olympic family.”
Even after shaking off past corruption scandals, the IOC remains addicted to extravagance. The Games float on national hyperbole and civic rivalry, festivals of competitive structures. The IOC requires each venue to meet meticulous specifications at whatever cost. The number of sports increases each time — currently 26 covering about 400 events — all craving their hour in the television spotlight.
About 95 percent of the budget of a modern Olympics goes on steel, concrete, bricks and mortar, even in cities such as London with perfectly adequate facilities already. “Starchitects” propose ever wilder arenas that everyone knows will come in at double or triple their estimates. The Games absorb labor, energy, materials, land and effort which by definition are not available for urban investment elsewhere. The global scale of such evanescent spending over the decades must be staggering.
Under the IOC’s new president, Thomas Bach, there have been some signs of concern, if not of remorse, at this extravagance. Bach has declared his commitment to “sustainable development,” whatever that means. This has mostly taken the form of preferring rich hosts and stable governments able to deliver soaring budgets without significant protest from local people, such as Beijing and Sochi, and indeed, London.
In these terms Brazil was always a gamble. Earlier this month one of London’s Olympic organizers, Lord Dyson, visited Rio to brief its team on lessons from London. He brought two messages: the need for total engagement in the Games of the whole host nation and the need for a palpable legacy. It was good advice. Rio’s vanity is much resented elsewhere in Brazil, and a host city in crisis will need its nation on board. Rio has taken one bit of advice from London and hired the US project contractor, AECOM, to “deliver” the Games.
Meanwhile legacy has become a ruling obsession of Olympics public relations.
As one Rio official put it: “Without legacy there is no way so much money can justifiably be spent on a fortnight of sports.”
What is legacy, though? All that is certain is that the sums spent on construction are gargantuan. The Brazilian World Cup was originally bid at a cost of US$1 billion for new stadiums and upgrades. This swiftly rose with associated infrastructure to more than US$8 billion, with only the vaguest concept of audit.
When Rio won the Games in 2009, to ecstatic scenes on Copacabana beach, the talk was of holding down costs by reusing facilities built for the Pan-American Games of 2007. The latest official count has this cost at US$15 billion, more than London. However, estimates of committed “Olympics-related legacy” stretch as high as US$90 billion over the current decade. This must imply a severe distortion of Brazil’s normal infrastructure planning.
On the Games themselves, 52 projects were to be located in four hubs. “Nomadic architecture” would be employed, whereby stadiums could be dismantled and rebuilt as schools. In addition there was a new “Transcarioca” urban highway with rapid-transit bus lanes, two other lines, 57 new hotels and the renewal of the semi-derelict port area of Rio. The city’s Guanabara Bay would be relieved of its flotsam and of the pollution pouring into it from surrounding favelas — an essential clean-up if the sailing events are to take place.
Most exciting of all was the first coherent plan for investment in favela “urbanization,” the so-called Morar Carioca. Fashioned in partnership with the Institute of Brazilian Architects, it committed US$4.5 billion to “infrastructure, landscaping, leisure and living ... generating comfort and dignity for more than 200,000 people.” This was to run in parallel with the favela “pacification” program instituted by Rio de Janeiro State Governor Sergio Cabral and Police Chief Jose Beltramine.
Begun in 2008, this determined to liberate the fifth of the city’s inhabitants living in mostly hillside districts outside the rule of law, rife with anarchy, drug-dealing, violence and lacking in public services. The plan would be a true legacy, one of the most imaginative urban renewal projects anywhere.
The legacy of the legacy has been bitter disappointment. The crosstown highway has been built and the port area is being revived. However, the bay remains polluted. There have been battles over favela clearances to make way for Games sites, notably at Vila Autodromo next to the main Olympic Park. Activists from the Popular Committee for the World Cup and Olympics claim more than 170,000 people are being driven from their homes for Games-related purposes. Rio may not match Beijing’s record for Olympic eviction, when a reported 1.5 million people were cleared for 2008, but it is rising fast.
Even in the favelas, Brazilians supposedly enjoy rights to consultation before compulsory removal and to being rehoused near their existing homes — chief reason for the rarity of slum clearance.
However, the committee’s Renato Consentino said, “When your home is impeding the Olympics, everything is short-circuited.”
Some eviction notices even carry the Olympic logo, hardly enhancing the Games’ popularity. After such elevated expectations, to be hit by two huge events in succession, Consentino said, “has emptied out any time for democracy.”
Brazilians are habitual sceptics of what their governmental leaders tell them. They are free from the instinctive deference to government that seems to be shared by Russians, Chinese and even Britons. Promises from people in power mean little to most Brazilians since the pledges are so rarely kept.
In Rio, the tide of opinion appears at last to be turning. For FIFA’s World Cup, celebrity “ambassadors” were chosen from among the nation’s soccer stars, such as Pele and Ronaldo. Both have been ridiculed by street protesters as “enemies of the people.” Meanwhile, their former colleague, Romario, a former soccer player turned politician, has taken to the airwaves and is running for the legislature, hurling abuse at FIFA’s extravagance and deriding Blatter and Valcke as “thieves and sons of bitches,” (and worse). He asks how they can demand that Brazil pay for “first-world stadiums when we cannot afford first-world hospitals and schools.”
Saddest of all has been the virtual abandonment of Morar Carioca. While the pacification program has been moderately successful, with roughly half the favelas “retaken” by the police from gangsters, there has been little or no follow-up with sewers, water supply, streets and social infrastructure. By the end of last year, the Catalytic Communities Web site recorded that of the 219 favelas initially designated, upgrades had begun in none.
In his office, Institute of Brazilian Architects president Sergio Magalhaes shuffles gloomily over the plans and drawings of what had been proposed for his city and is now in abeyance. He sees the backtracking as “recklessly adding to a general sense of dissatisfaction.” Infrastructure projects such as the urban highway merely “link rich area to rich area.”
Any visitor to Rio is left puzzled at the naivety with which it ever believed the IOC’s hyperbole.
There is no Midas touch to grand sports events, just cost. An extravagant opening and closing ceremony, some gold medals for the hosts and good public relations can generate a passing feel-good effect, as they did in Barcelona and London. Even when the cost is crippling, as with Athens, the IOC’s salesmen declared a “return in glory, reputation and future tourism.”
Serious economists despair of these events. The founder of the modern Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin, saw them as forging peace between peoples. With Berlin in 1936, they became more a festival of chauvinism, a beauty contest between nations and ideologies, reaching a sort of nadir at the Sochi Winter Games.
A report by Bloomberg suggests the chief gain is not in peace but in construction company share prices. A study by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski predicts that this year’s World Cup will see a transfer of wealth from Brazil as a whole to various interest groups, mostly soccer clubs and private corporations. It will “not be an economic bonanza.”
The much-vaunted extra tourism is an Olympic chimera. Sydney in 2000 was told it would see a boom in visits and when this failed it ran angry advertisements with the slogan, “So where the bloody hell are you?” Athens and Beijing were half deserted for the Olympics and South Africa’s World Cup saw barely two-thirds of the predicted visitors. British tourism was blitzed by the 2012 Olympics and is still 3 percent down on 2011.
The nearest parallel to the Olympics nowadays is probably a war: an outburst of patriotic fervor, fathered by mild mendacity out of public expenditure. Criticism is suppressed. Medals tables are listed like battle honors. Home contestants are heroes. Winners are showered with state baubles and losers stripped of grants.
Some of Rio’s more cynical citizens even give this parallel a sort of welcome. They hope the Olympics might discipline a lethargic city bureaucracy, defeating the naysayers as deadlines fall due and yielding at least some projects of lasting usefulness. They are pleased that Rio is now the focus of world attention, with resulting self-criticism. The favelas are crawling with academics and camera crews as never before, as if waiting for them to explode for the World Cup and the Games.
This could suggest a new phenomenon: the mega-event as the critical mover in cities where the politics of urban renewal has seized up. Whether such a trauma is the best way of ordering any society is another matter. Any city that can blow billions of dollars on a fortnight’s party and not repair public services such as Rio’s has its governance seriously awry.
Even before the party has begun, much of Rio seems to be suffering from a hangover. The mayor is talking masochism and there are plenty of others, including within the IOC, wondering whether it is too late to stop. Rio University planning professor Orlando dos Santos Junior sees dire conflict ahead in the clash between spending on white elephants and crying needs elsewhere in the city — producing what he calls “an agony of disappointed loyalties.”
Rio still has time to show the courage that London lacked in 2005. London boasted that it would stage “a people’s Games,” a low-cost festival of urban fun. However, it capitulated to the IOC’s grandiosity, building a new stadium rather than using Wembley and raising a US$4 billion budget to US$13 billion.
Rio could do the precise opposite. It could welcome the world to whatever stadiums and arenas are left from the 2007 Pan-American Games and rely on television to reach audiences. It could tailor the Olympics to Rio rather than Rio to the Olympics. The city of Carnival would offer a carnival of sports, proving that poor cities as well as rich ones can stage these events.
Do that, and instead of being abused for delay and incompetence, this magnificent city would have the world cheering its daring and its guts. Go for it, Rio.
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