BAD SPORTS: WHITE ELEPHANTS BLIGHT RIO DE JANEIRO
Less than six months after the Summer Games ended, the Brazilian host city’s Olympic legacy is decaying rapidly amid broken promises
While it is not uncommon for the Olympics to leave behind some unneeded facilities, Rio is experiencing something exceptional. Less than six months after the Summer Games ended, the host city’s Olympic legacy is decaying rapidly.
Empty Olympic buildings abound, puncturing any uplifting buzz from the competitions last summer. At the Olympic Park, some stadium entrances are boarded up and screws are scattered on the ground. The handball arena is barricaded by metal bars. The broadcast centre remains half disassembled. The warm-up pool is decorated with piles of dirt and puddles.
Deodoro, a neighbourhood in Rio’s poor periphery, has the second-largest cluster of Olympic venues. The canoe slalom course was to be converted into a giant public swimming pool. It closed to the public in December. Now residents fill plastic pools a few hundred feet away.
“The government put sugar in our mouths and took it out before we could swallow,” said Luciana Oliveira Pimentel, a social worker from Deodoro. “Once the Olympics ended, they turned their backs on us.”
Olympic officials and local organisers often boast about the legacy of the games — the residual benefits that a city and country will experience long after the competitions end. Those projections are often met with scepticism by the public and by independent economists, who argue that Olympic bids are built on wasted public money. Rio has quickly become the latest, and perhaps most striking, case of unfulfilled promises and abandonment.
“It’s totally deserted,” said Vera Hickmann, 42, who was at the Olympic Park recently with her family. She lamented that although the area was open to the public, it lacked basic services.
At the athletes’ village, across the street from the park, the 31 towers were supposed to be sold as luxury condominiums after the games, but fewer than 10% of the units have been sold. Across town at Maracana Stadium, a soccer temple, the field is brown and the electricity has been shut off.
“The government didn’t have money to throw a party like that, and we’re the ones who have to sacrifice,” Ms Hickmann said, referring to local taxpayers.
In the preparations for the games, the city of Rio promised “no white elephants”. The arena that hosted taekwondo and fencing was to be transformed into a school. Two other arenas were
to be taken apart, and one put back together as four schools in another area. None of that has happened.
The mayor’s office said those plans were still in the works, but it did not offer a specific timetable.
The decay of Olympic venues is happening as a financial crisis engulfs federal, state and municipal governments. “The nation is in crisis, Rio de Janeiro is in crisis — it’s time to be cautious,” Marcelo Crivella, who became mayor Jan 1, told incoming city council members. “Spending is prohibited,” he added.
Rio’s mayor during the games, Eduardo Paes, was among the strongest evangelisers of an Olympic legacy. He said in an email that it was too soon to call any of the sites white elephants and that “the path to implementing a legacy has been given”.
After the games, the city of Rio held an auction for private companies to bid on administering the Olympic Park, but there were no bidders. This left the Ministry of Sport with the financial burden. The minister of sport, Leonardo Picciani, said the agency’s goal was to find a private company to take over the park, but since there has been no interest, it is the government’s responsibility to maintain such venues.
Mr Picciani also said that the stadiums would not become burdensome relics, pointing to several sporting events at Olympic Park scheduled for this year, along with sports training programmes.
Renato Cosentino, a researcher at the Regional and Urban Planning Institute at the Federal University of Rio, says the park “was born as a white elephant”, because it was built in a far-flung wealthy suburb that is home to only about 5% of Rio’s 6.3 million residents.
Having the majority of investment there, he said, proves the Olympics were meant to serve real estate developers, who took on much of the construction for the games in exchange for being able to build on the land afterward, in what is known as a public-private partnership.
Even developers’ expectations have not panned out. Construction giants Carvalho Hosken and Odebrecht took on the project of building the athletes’ village in hopes of selling the apartments as luxury condominiums after the games, banking on the area’s becoming a desirable neighbourhood for the city’s elite. In the complex of 31, 17-storey towers that make up the village, only 20 units have been sold since the beginning of the Olympics in August, bringing the total sold to just 260, out of 3,604 apartments.
In a scramble to sell off the apartments before Carvalho Hosken becomes responsible for about US$6.5 million (228 million baht) in monthly interest payments, the company is in the process of striking a deal with Rio’s city government to sell them to civil servants at discounted prices with low interest rates, according to the Brazilian newspaper O Globo.
Rio’s iconic soccer stadium, the Maracana, which hosted the opening and closing ceremonies, has also fallen into disrepair, with a brown field, several thousand seats uprooted, televisions missing and nearly $1 million owed to the electricity company. The consortium that normally administers the stadium, Maracana SA, claims that Rio 2016 and the Rio state government did not hold up their end of the contract that required them to maintain the stadium and return it in the state it was given to them.
The run-down Deodoro neighbourhood was a favourite talking point for Olympic officials before and during the games. Several sites were constructed there, heralded as a shining example of how the Olympics can lift a blighted area.
The flagship, however, was the giant swimming pool, used as the canoe slalom course, which opened to the public before the games.
When the pool opened, Mr Paes, the mayor then, beamed. “We’ve made an early legacy here,” he said. “I think this is something unheard of in the history of the Olympics.”
The pool is now closed. The current mayor again said the city intended to reopen the pool as soon as possible, but he did not forecast a date.
Close by, the Triangulo favela community was disrupted to make way for rapid bus lines that were expanded before the Olympics. Several homes and the community’s plaza, its main leisure space, were removed by the construction.
Today, a turnaround for the buses looms over where the plaza used to be, but residents have no access to the buses. They say they were promised a bus terminal and a new leisure space, but neither has come.
“The government, business people — they tricked us. They came, they robbed, and they said goodbye,” said Camila Felix Muguet, 36, who lost part of her home and her backyard to the project. “Now they’re gone, and where are our upgrades?”
Ms Pimentel, the social worker, said she always suspected that the public pool might not last.
“The Olympics ended, Deodoro ended,” she said, shaking her head. “We’re going to be forgotten.”