LEGACY OF RIO OLYMPICS ONE OF WASTE AND ABANDONMENT
When cities spend public money on sports facilities, broken promises usually follow
During the opening ceremony at last summer’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, athletes streamed into Maracana Stadium carrying a seed packet. They deposited the seeds into a large, slotted mirror, and it was explained this would later form the basis for the Athletes’ Forest, a key element of a park that would be created in Deodoro, an area of the city that was home to a cluster of Olympic venues. Such a nice idea, that. Deodoro is not a wealthy area and the opportunity to create a legacy green space was often cited as an important benefit of the Games.
Having trees that would tie directly to the memories of the athletes was just a bonus.
Ten months later, the elements of that opening scene are an awkward microcosm of Rio 2016. Deodoro remains a cluster of now-unused venues, not a park. The seeds are presumably sitting in a facility somewhere, if they haven’t been claimed by creditors. And Maracana Stadium was looted and vandalized when operators couldn’t pay to maintain it. The power was turned off and security contractors went home.
The Olympic legacy of Rio is fast becoming one of regret.
And while the International Olympic Committee long ago acknowledged the bloat of Rio and Sochi and has advocated a more sustainable development model for future games, the situation in Brazil provides an abject lesson for potential bidders in places like Quebec City and Calgary: the more you dress up Olympic spending into big, longterm legacy projects, the more risk you run that those things will never materialize.
In Rio, some of those legacies were written off before the Games started. By far the biggest opportunity the Olympics provided was a chance to clean the city’s notoriously polluted waterways. But with budgets squeezed by inevitable overruns and a crashing economy, Rio bid officials skipped big-dollar items as they focused on just making sure they could pull off the Games.
And so, the expensive wastetreatment facilities that were supposed to finally ensure clean water — not raw sewage — flowed into Rio’s picturesque bays and lagoons were instead replaced by cheap pipes and dams that diverted the poop water away from Olympic sites, and only as a temporary fix.
Similarly, the original bid document promised a subway line connecting Rio’s chaotic downtown to the western suburb of Barra da Tijuca, home of the multi-venue Olympic Park. That became a subway that went halfway, depriving the city of a completed line that might have helped its crushing traffic problems.
But as the Games unfolded, there remained hope organizers would still follow through on other legacy projects. Deodoro was — and technically still is — a big one, with plans to convert it to a park with public swimming facilities.
At Olympic Park, one of the venues — the not coincidentally named Future Arena — was to be deconstructed after the show had left town and turned into four schools. Instead, it’s an empty handball arena.
“It will be dismantled,” an official said at a public hearing this week, The Associated Press reported. “We are just waiting to know whether we will actually have resources to build these schools on other sites, or whether we dismantle it and wait for the resources to come.”
The organizing committee reportedly owes creditors more than US$30 million and the state is bankrupt, so it is hard to imagine those resources suddenly materializing.
Oh, and the Olympic Golf Course stopped having any maintenance work done because workers weren’t paid. There are reports that greenskeeping has resumed, but the course is still empty — a problem that probably could have been foreseen in a city where an estimated 0.025 per cent of the people are golfers. (In Canada, that number is around 19 per cent.)
Not following up on plans is one thing, but the context here is many of these projects were cited as reasons why Rio, a troubled city in a troubled country, should want to host such a costly spectacle. Schools, subways, parks, housing, clean water: all of these longterm gains would flow from the short-term spending the Games would spark. Unless they didn’t. So far, they didn’t even spark the simpler things, like getting the odd Brazilian to take up golf.
This isn’t just an Olympics problem. Proposed public spending on sports facilities is often wrapped into a larger bonanza that includes other long-term amenities — looking at you again, Calgary — so that it doesn’t look like billions invested in some games. But many an arena-andsomething-else complex ends up just an arena and some nifty artist’s renderings of the something else.
Rio stands out as the starkest example yet of what can go wrong when big Olympic promises are not met, because it’s a city that could least afford the mistake.
A prosecutor at a public hearing in Rio said this week, “there was no planning when they put out the bid to host the Games. No planning.”
I’m not sure that’s true. The Rio bid had great plans. They only made the eventual disappointment that much more obvious.
Rio stands out as the starkest example yet of what can go wrong when big Olympic promises are not met.