After Rio Games, Decaying Venues
RIO DE JANEIRO — It is not uncommon for the Olympics to leave behind some unneeded facilities. Rio, however, is experiencing something exceptional: Less than six months after the Summer Games ended, the city’s Olympic legacy is decaying.
Empty Olympic buildings abound, puncturing any uplifting buzz from the competitions last summer. At the Olympic Park, some stadium entrances are boarded up. The handball arena is barricaded with metal bars. The warm-up pool is decorated with dirt and puddles.
Deodoro, a neighborhood in Rio’s poor outskirts, has the second-largest cluster of Olympic sites. The canoe slalom course was to be converted into a giant public swimming pool. It closed to the public in December. Today, residents fill plastic pools a few hundred meters away.
“The government put sugar in our mouths and took it out before we could swallow,” Luciana Oliveira Pimentel, a social worker from Deodoro, said as her children played in a plastic pool. “They turned their backs on us.”
Olympic officials and local organizers often boast about the legacy of the Games— the benefits a city and coun- try will experience after the competitions end. Those projections are often met with skepticism by the public and by independent economists, who argue that Olympic bids are built on wasted public money. Rio has become perhaps the most striking case.
At the athletes’ village, across from the park, the 31 towers were supposed to be sold as luxury condominiums after the Games, but fewer than 10 percent have been sold.
“The government didn’t have money to throw a party like that, and we’re the ones who have to sacrifice,” Ms. Hickmann said.
Before the Games, the city promised “no white elephants” and outlined plans for facilities to be turned i nto public sporting areas and schools. The arena that hosted taekwondo and fencing was to become a school. Two other arenas were to be taken apart, and one was to be turned into four schools. The mayor’s office said those plans were still in the works, but there is no timetable.
The decay is happening as a finan- cial crisis engulfs the country. “The nation is in crisis, Rio de Janeiro is in crisis — it’s time to be cautious,” the mayor, Marcelo Crivella, said.
After the Games, the city held an auction for companies to bid on administering the Olympic Park, but there were no bidders. That left the Ministry of Sport with the burden.
Rio’s prominent soccer stadium, the Maracanã, which hosted the opening and closing ceremonies, has fallen into disrepair, with several thousand seats uprooted, televisions missing and nearly $1 million owed to the electricity company.
The Deodoro neighborhood was a focus for Olympic officials. Several sites were built there, heralded as an example of how the Olympics can lift a blighted area. The flagship, however, was the giant swimming pool, which opened to the public before the Games. The pool is now closed, though temperatures are regularly in the 30s and the neighborhood is a long bus ride from Rio’s beaches. Mr. Crivella said the city intended to reopen the pool as soon as possible, but he did not forecast a date.
Close by, the Triângulo favela community was disrupted to make way for rapid bus lines that were expanded before the Olympics. Several homes and the community’s plaza, its main park area, were removed by the construction. Today, a turnaround for the buses looms over where the plaza used to be, but residents have no access to the buses. .
“The government, business people — they tricked us,” said Camila Felix Muguet, 36, who lost part of her home to the project. “They came, they robbed, and they said goodbye. ”