Rio’s Olympic legacy lies in ruins
“very sad day for the whole continent”. This was the portentous verdict of Gideon Sam, kingpin of South Africa’s sporting mandarins, as Durban lost its tortuous fight to be ready to stage the 2022 Commonwealth Games.
Well, yes and no. Sad in the sense that Durban was handed the showpiece on a silver platter, after Edmonton pulled out, and still the politicians could not make it work. But a grievous setback to all of Africa? To believe this is to entertain oceangoing delusions of grandeur. Few outside the old relics of the British Empire have even heard of this strange, sepia-tinted jamboree, where a 50-year-old Scotsman is hailed as the “Lionel Messi of bowls” and where Wales somehow win medals for sprinting.
For while Clare Balding spent a large segment of her highlights show at the Glasgow Games looking fascinated by the backstories of athletes from St Helena, a question on the US quiz show asked: “A 50 pence piece marks the 20th celebration of which multi-country games, to be held in the UK in 2014?” None of the three contestants could answer, even with £1,500 on the line.
Once the immediate sorrow among Durban organisers has passed, they might reflect that they have, all things considered, been granted a huge favour.
Multi-sport spectaculars have no business in descending upon developing nations trying to remedy a plethora of socioeconomic ills, on which money would be far more fruitfully spent.
That much is evident from the pitiful shambles in Rio, a mere seven months after the Olympics. In 2009, the city was awarded the Games on the premise that Brazil’s economy was burgeoning. Instead, it slipped into a deep recession, yielding the obscene scenario where a municipal government unable to pay off its debts played host to chauffeur-driven Olympic powerbrokers on £900 per diems.
It is one of life’s immutable truths that you cannot change the world from Switzerland. Just as Fifa executives can feign little empathy with Eritrean grass-roots football over vodka martinis at Zurich’s Baur au Lac, so members of the International Olympic Committee, sequestered in their Lausanne lair, tend to be oblivious to the gravity of Rio’s post-Games plight.
Still, this did not stop Christophe Dubi, the IOC’s sports director, from depicting Rio, which owes its creditors for the Games over £25million, as a land of milk and honey thanks to last summer’s party. “There is a positive impact on tourism,” he said yesterday. “They have a new infrastructure of tourism that allows them to host tourists in a much better fashion than before.” That must be of great comfort to Cariocas who have had their electricity cut off due to unpaid bills, or to residents of the Maracana district, where looters have torn up swathes of their iconic but now deserted stadium.
Dubi identifies his specialist