Just say no when it comes to hosting Olympic Games
Arenas sit empty or boarded-up
RIO DE JANEIRO, May 24, (AP): It never figured to end well for Rio.
Just hosting the Olympics took everything out of the city. Trying to recover from them may be impossible.
Nine months after hosting the world’s best athletes in a flawed — and mostly joyless — Olympics, Rio has little to show for the $12 billion effort. Arenas sit empty or boardedup, the Olympic Park is vacant, and the city’s former mayor is being investigated for allegedly accepting $5 million in payments for construction projects tied to the games. And now, even some of the medals presented to athletes are falling apart.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this when Rio won the first Olympics in South America in 2009, with a promise to showcase Brazil and its culture. Chicago was the odds-on favorite to get the games, but Rio organizers convinced IOC voters they could stage a historic Olympics.
“There was absolutely no flaw in the bid,” then IOC president, Jacques Rogge, said at the time of the vote.
This was before Zika made an appearance, one problem Olympic officials couldn’t be expected to foresee. But they knew the waters where sailors and rowers would compete were filthy, and should have known that promises to clean them up before the games wouldn’t be kept.
One look around Rio and they could have also figured out that $12 billion might have been better spent improving the conditions of the mil- lions of impoverished Brazilians who crowd into the city’s infamous favelas.
That the Olympics are a bloated exercise in excess isn’t exactly a state secret. That they always cost more than originally estimated and are far more complicated by the time they go off is also well known to anyone who follows the Olympic movement even casually.
Those are issues that can be overcome in wealthy countries with unlimited resources. China and Russia proved that by staging Olympics that were successful on the surface, even if they lacked a little soul and — in Russia’s case — were marred by cheats both on the ice and in the doping lab.
But one thing Rio — and Athens before that in 2004 — proved is that the Olympics are much too big now to dump on countries that have to struggle to handle them.
The lesson seems to be sinking in, judged from the lack of serious bidders for the 2024 summer games. Paris and Los Angeles are the only two contenders left for those Olympics, after several other cities tested the waters and found them to be too rich for their tastes.
Even the two remaining bids — which will be voted on in September — envision games that will take place for the most part in existing facilities without huge costs for infrastructure.
OLYMPICS