The Summer Olympics, with dramatic storylines and the U.S. dominating, reaches the finish line
Athletes gloss over whatever problems the Games had
RIO DE JANEIRO — It was hard to say which was more beautiful, the peak-to-sea silhouettes of the imperial old city, or the athletes in sweet motion. They were the wallpaper for everything, and without them you’d be left with the debts and the floating garbage and the flying rocks, and you’d have to ask whether the Olympics are really worth it anymore. So it’s a good thing the Redeemer and Neymar were there.
They covered up the ragged edges and the back-bowed weariness of the town. They were the curtains that hid the nakedness of International Olympic Committee member Patrick Hickey of Ireland, arrested in his hotel and charged with ticket scalping. They hid the half-empty stadiums and the state’s $6 billion deficit, and the Olympian cost overruns, with a budget shortfall so steep there was a question whether the Paralympics could be staged. On Sunday morning, some venues and their unsteady pipe-and-board pedestrian ramps had already been dismantled to save money. It was more than a little hard to swallow IOC President Thomas Bach’s contention these were “the people’s Games; most happy Games ever; the beautiful Games; passion Games.”
There were visible signs of Rio’s cash-strapped struggle to throw the Games. An open sewer just outside the Olympic Park reeked and each morning helicopters hovered over polluted Guanabara Bay checking it so large debris and waste wouldn’t float into the venues. Inexperience caused the diving venue’s pools to turn so green you couldn’t see the bottom. A cable snapped and sent a giant camera crashing down
on spectators in the Olympic Park. A boat ramp collapsed, a brush fire broke out. Still, Rio’s citizens and volunteers somehow brought off this massive undertaking, caring and feeding 10,000 athletes and their entourages.
The exalting performances of those athletes against the backdrop of green mountains plunging into bays made the breakdowns seem like glitches. It was arguably the most remarkable collection of champions ever collected in one place.
“There you go, I am the greatest,” Usain Bolt crowed after winning his ninth gold in the 4x100-meter relay, but he had to share the claim with the dolphin-backed Michael Phelps, the epic sojourner Katie Ledecky, the human pinwheel Simon Biles, and a titanic U.S. women’s basketball team that won its sixth straight gold medal.
It’s not just great ones we will remember either.
“Every time you beat someone you’re crushing their dreams, so it’s a tough old process,” said Britain’s boxing gold medalist Nicola Adams.
Wrestler Helen Maroulis said she “just didn’t want to look at Goliath and get scared,” and produced one of the great gold medal upsets of the Games over three-time champ Saori Yoshida.
Shakur Stevenson and wrestler Jordan Burroughs made defeat sound like soul-singing, to drown out the lame-drunk Ryan Lochte. But maybe no words were as affecting as those of Abbey D’Agostino to Nikki Hamblin of New Zealand after they stumbled in a 5,000-meter heat:
“Get up, get up, we have to finish this.”
It could have been the motto for the entire put-upon city, trying to throw a world-class event while burdened to the breaking point. Unemployment is at 11 percent and rising, corruption scandals dot the political landscape, civil servants are owed back pay, and rampant street crime is a plague amid a murderous war between military police and gangs. Though there were robberies and a stray bullet, the Olympic guests were relatively untouched by all this, compared to the every-day Brazilian.
That itself was a victory. As Rio 2016’s amiable spokesman Mario Andrada said, “Sometimes a bronze looks like a gold, and you celebrate the achievements of a nation.”