Olympic countdown, and scramble, is on.

Every Olympics begins long before the Opening Ceremony makes some portion of the world feel like it’s on drugs. Every Opening Ceremony does this: it’s in the rules. Canada put Wayne Gretzky in the back of a pickup truck with the Olympic flame to be chased by yahoos on bikes in Vancouver in the rain. Hello, world.

Well, at some point we should check in on Rio, where the 2016 Summer Games will begin in 19 weeks, or a little over four months. Let’s see how it’s going. Hmm. Here’s a summary: 1. There’s an economic crisis. When the Games were awarded to Brazil in 2009, the economy was booming. Now, it’s all inflation and unemployment. This has prompted budget cuts, and Olympic spending cuts. But that has been overshadowed, because . . .

2. There is a corruption crisis, and maybe a constitutional crisis, depending. There are impeachment proceedings against President Dilma Rousseff, which are said to be a little thin. But then she tried to hire her predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, as her chief of staff — which was awkward, since he’s on the verge of being arrested on his own corruption charges, apparently, and the job would come with partial immunity from prosecution. Whoops.

Also, a judge then released wiretaps of her conversations with him and others. Exciting! On one wiretap, Rio’s mayor and a key organizer, Eduardo Paes, seemed to complain about how the Games were going, saying, “You have no idea how I’m suffering! It’s screwed.”

This was before his name appeared on a very long list of public officials who appeared to have received payoffs. There are also truly massive street protests. As organizing committee spokesman Mario Andrada told the Associated Press, “If this was five years ago, we could have even lost the Games.”

But the president is holding fast, perhaps because . . .

3. Almost everybody who might replace Rousseff faces corruption charges that are actually more serious. According to the New York Times, 271of the 594 members of Brazil’s Congress are facing “serious charges,” while according to the Economist, 352 “face accusations of criminal wrongdoing.” To the 242 remaining members of Brazil’s Congress, I say either you are doing something very right, or something very wrong. Also, for the record . . . 3. The scandal is called the “Car Wash” scandal, because some of the money laundering started on the premises of a gas station that featured a car wash. At some point there was also an Operation What Kind of Country Is This? Hopefully all of this is reflected in the Opening Ceremony.

Which needed corporate support from Panasonic, because . . .

4. Money problems. With eight months to go, the organizing committee talked about cutting its budget by approximately 30 per cent, and briefly said athletes would have to pay for their own air conditioning before backpedalling like backpedalling was an Olympic event. With six months to go the organizing committee dropped the number of volunteers from 70,000 to 50,000, dropped the number of transportation vehicles from 5,000 to 4,000, decided to leave seats unbuilt at several venues, and dropped TVs from the athletes’ village, ensuring that the biannual stories about athletes having sex during the Games could really ramp up this time.

And the Games will apparently sell mosquito netting to athletes for their rooms, because of . . .

5. The Zika virus. At one point a genetics company suggested releasing a genetically modified type of mosquito to eat the type of mosquito that carries Zika. I think we can all agree this idea has no downside. Unlike . . .

6. The virus-soaked sewage problem for open-water events, which is not going away, and will not be fixed by August. One sailor also saw a human arm in the water in February, though in fairness, you could hardly see it in the sea of bubbling brown foam in the water. Also, fewer than half the available tickets were sold as of early March, so that’s fewer sets of keen eyes, scanning the water for bodies.

Of course, every Olympics experiences turbulence before it begins; this is also in the rules. Beijing was going to take place in a repressive smog-hell. (It did, though the smog lifted in the final week or so.) Vancouver didn’t have proper snow in some places, and nobody in the town seemed to care. (This changed.) London had to bring in the army to bolster security. (They seemed very nice, with sharp uniforms. Some of them had berets with pom-poms.)