Rio’s plight should give future hosts pause
One year ago this week, as Facebook is determined to remind me, I was living in a lush jungle.
I was in Rio de Janeiro. Checking into my (almost finished) village. Wandering around the (barely finished) Olympic park. Finding my way around the (partially finished) transportation system.
My overwhelming feeling during almost a month in Brazil was sympathy. Sympathy for the struggling country that couldn’t even clean up its waters or have a working sewage system. Sympathy for the citizens whose politicians and leaders had robbed them through corruption and bribes. Sympathy for a country that bid and won the Olympics when it was flying high in an economic bubble but had to host the Games after it burst.
Now, the venues built for the event — promised to be turned into housing and schools — are largely vacant and deteriorating.
“There was no planning,” said a federal prosecutor looking into the economic disaster. The buildings “are white elephants today.”
That’s part of the motto of the modern Olympics: faster, higher, obsolete within months. It’s what we heard after Sydney, Athens, Beijing.
Organizers still owe creditors between $30 billion and $40 billion. Many of the politicians who were behind the bid are being investigated for corruption.
Why any city would bid on the Olympics after years of corruption and economic strife is amazing. But just this week, the unofficial decision was made that Paris will host the Olympics in 2024 and Los Angeles will host the 2028 Games (Tokyo is the next summer host in 2020).
Those cities, like London in 2012, already have a solid infrastructure in place and probably won’t end up as devastated by the event as Rio was. Los Angeles wisely got financial concessions from the IOC in return for agreeing to be second in line behind Paris. The IOC will give at least $1.8 billion to the L.A. organizing committee, make advance payments for youth sports and forfeit its customary 20 percent share of surplus revenue.
But even established cities without as many burdens as Rio should beware. You can’t cut corners in the Olympics.
Rio learned that the hard way. Even the medals, now rusting and chipped, didn’t stand the test of time. They are a perfect symbol of the damaged Olympic movement.