Sorry, but the Rio Games leave me with a bad taste
A VIEW FROM RIO, FROM PA CORRESPONDENT MARK STANIFORTH
IN the crackling hillside favelas that glower down upon the Rio Olympic Park, it’s safe to assume they care little for the rudiments of mixed doubles badminton.
One week in, and the International Olympic Committee’s decision to take the ever-growing Games to South America appears as precarious a choice as hooking up to the electrical cables which fizz across the cramped corridors of the desperate, precipitous suburbs.
The glib hope, of course, is that some of the city’s disenfranchised youth will be inspired.
Enough, perhaps, to repeat the improbable journey of Brazilian judoka Raffaela Silva, a Rio native who shot all the way to Olympic gold.
Such stories make one hesitate to heap scorn on a Games that has been drenched in difficulties every bit as moralistic as they are material.
But at the heart of the problem is not so much the inevitable failings of this exuberant and wildly exciting city, complete with its economic crises, but with the International Olympic Committee itself.
Stumble around the soulless and threequarter finished concrete void that is the Olympic Park, past the stalls selling soggy $12 cheeseburgers, and it is not hard to come to the realisation that these truly are the Games that ate themselves.
What is the point, you might ask, of the IOC’s enthusiasm for spreading the Games to South America if, when it finally gets there, it is purged of its stereotypical samba soul?
What remains is less the Girl From Ipanema, as the girl who works a zero-hour contract in a Sports Direct warehouse in Shirebrook.
It saps that soul, which is surely imperative in order to serve the Games’ single and longforgotten purpose – inspiring kids to put down their Playstations and go out and get fit.
The Games that ate themselves continue to munch, Pac-Man style, up to new levels of size. In Tokyo in 2020, five new sports will be added, including that bastion of the Olympic ideal, skateboarding.
We in Britain should not escape criticism, either. From our armchairs we embrace a climate in which great clumps of medals and funding targets take first place over individual moments of brilliance, wherever they may rank.
There are plenty of glorious things about the Rio Olympics. The volunteers and locals are delightfully eager to engage, whether or not they hold the Games at heart. And the sport, of course, shines through.
But you could stage the Olympics in that Sports Direct Shirebrook hangar and still guarantee a Saturday just as Super.
The Olympics were inaugurated as a bastion of honourable, amateur competition.
They badly need to slim back down so they can once again see their feet.