Rio’s post-Olympic transformation fails expectations

RIO DE JANEIRO — Neymar kissed the ball, delivered a gold medal and then wept with other Brazilians.

Look no further if you’re searching for an iconic image of the Rio de Janeiro Olympics.

“It’s the only medal that really mattered,” Salvador Gaeta said recently while cycling in the deserted Olympic Park. “Every Brazilian will remember it.”

Other memories have faded at home since the Olympics opened a year ago. A few expectations were met, but many fell short of those promised by IOC President Thomas Bach and organizing committee head Carlos Nuzman.

Bach boasted at the closing ceremony of “a Rio de Janeiro before, and a much better Rio de Janeiro after the Olympic Games.”

Nuzman called Rio the next Barcelona, one of the cities clearly transformed by the games.

Save for minor cosmetic changes, a city fractured by mountains and searing inequality remains as it was. Violent crime mostly concealed during the Olympics is soaring, tied to Brazil’s deepest economic downturn in 100 years and unpaid policemen leaving in droves.

Rio barely managed to keep it together for the Olympics, needed a government bailout to hold the Paralympics and then collapsed under a grinding recession and sprawling corruption scandals.

The games took place mostly in the south and west of the city, which remains white and wealthy. The rest is still a hodgepodge of dilapidated factories and hillside slums of cinderblocks, tin roofs and open troughs of raw sewage.

Brazil says it spent $13 billion in public and private money to organize the Olympics — some estimates suggest $20 billion — and many games-related projects since then have been tied to corruption scandals that marred the games and drove up costs.

A look at the fallout since the Olympics opened on Aug. 5:

“From my point of view, the Olympics only benefited the foreigners. Local people themselves didn’t get much. The security situation isn’t good, the hospitals. I think these are investments that didn’t benefit many local people.”

He said he skipped the Olympics because they were “too expensive” and located far away in the suburbs.

The Olympics left a halfdozen vacant sports arenas in the Olympic Park and 3,600 empty apartments in the boarded-up Olympic Village. Deodoro, a major complex of venues in the impoverished north, is shuttered behind iron gates.

Standing across the street, Jose Mauricio Pehna de Souza was asked if Rio benefited from the Olympics.

“I don’t think so, not us in Brazil,” he said.

A $20 million golf course is struggling to find players and financing.

A few dozen were on the course on a recent, sunny Saturday. The clubhouse is mostly unfurnished, and it costs non-Brazilians 560 reals ($180) for 18 holes and a cart.

Organizers and the International Olympic Committee say Rio needs time to develop these venues, and faults Brazil’s deep recession for most of the problems.

The park offers few amenities: no restaurants, no shade and nothing much to do except gawk at deserted arenas. City hall officials and the federal government say they’re planning an event for Aug. 5 to “fill all the arenas” for the day.

Rio organizers promised to clean up polluted Guanabara Bay in their winning bid in 2009. During the Olympics, officials used stop-gap measures to keep floating sofas, logs and dead animals from crashing into boats during the sailing events.

Since the Olympics, the bankrupt state of Rio de Janeiro has ceased major efforts to clean the bay, its unwelcome stench often drifting along the highway from the international airport.

“I think it’s gotten worse,” Brazil’s gold-medal sailor Kahena Kunze said in a recent interview. “There was always floating trash, but I see more and more. It’s no use hiding the trash because it comes back.”

Avenida Brasil, the main north-south artery through the city, is a snarl of unfinished roads and express bus lanes, viaducts to nowhere and detours through miles (kilometers) of traffic cones.