Bar set low for Rio Olympics
Just one week away, let’s look at best, worst case scenarios
In one week, the Rio Olympics will be underway. We presume, anyway, barring a catastrophe. That’s all we’ve been hearing about for what seems like years when it comes to Rio: the catastrophes. At this point, if the Games don’t skid all the way into the ditch they will be deemed a success. Life is about setting reasonable expectations. So here are your best-and-worst-case scenarios for how the Games will unfold, day by day, based on past experience. We’re only guessing, but . . . Day 0: The Opening Ceremony. All Opening Ceremonies are ludicrous, but they provide important employment opportunities to choreographers, costume designers and lunatics, and about a billion people get to be confused by them worldwide. In Rio’s case, one of the goals is apparently sexiness, which may be balanced by Georgia’s athlete outfits, which according to the designer are based on the country’s medieval past.
The best-case for the Opening: Sexiness. The worst-case: Someone steals the costumes, and the performers have to use Georgia’s outfits. It is not sexy. Days 1-4: Okay, here’s where the buses and venues need to get running, and the great complex system really starts to stagger into action. Sports! There will be lots of sports. This is where you work out the kinks, or find out there are great gaping holes. Judgment will be swift: Three days after Vancouver’s Opening Ceremony, after a few snafus, the Guardian said Vancouver was in the running for the worst Games ever, and not because a Georgian luger was dead, and was posthumously blamed.
In the best-case, a few buses get lost, or mired in Rio’s notorious traffic; the lack of food at venues causes problems. There are hiccups. There are bigger hiccups. But it’s nothing that can’t be solved.
In the worst-case, athletes have still refused to move into the Athletes Village, where officials said repairs had been made after blaming disgruntled workers for actively sabotaging construction efforts, leading to electrical problems, plumbing problems, gas problems, and lighting problems. This creates security and logistical concerns, and it gets worse when an Aussie athlete is mugged outside the Olympic bubble.
Rio residents ignore the Olympic lane designations, and snarl traffic. Athletes even miss events. The Guardian writes that this may be the worst Games ever, and might have a chance of being generally sort of right. Days 5-8: Ah, this is where an Olympics settles in. The best case: The Games finds a rhythm. The buses sort themselves out. The traffic, too. The journalists haven’t hit the wall yet. The sports stories are great, as always, because Olympic athletes are amazing. Things begin to knit together. There are drinks.
The worst-case is Russia’s team starts to really win medals, and every press conference is a battle. Another athlete gets mugged, then two journalists are mugged, then three more, and eventually the columns about being mugged reach a bland sameness. (“I was walking down the street, and suddenly, I froze.”) The Olympic anti-doping lab is compromised. The buses are still getting lost, and the retired police who were only contracted Friday to run security are found to be incompetent. Protests clog the streets. As during the 2014 World Cup, police suppress the protests with rubber bullets, tear gas, and mass arrests. Days 8-12: The best-case: Everything’s more or less fine.
The worst case: Competitors in sailing, canoe, and kayak start to get sick from the water. A dead body bumps up against a boat, on television. Someone gets the super bacteria. The logistical problems continue, or worsen. The military on the street comes down hard on street crime. It all feels like it’s barely holding together, or falling apart. Days 13-16: The worst-case is truly the worst case, and it is hard to say. An amateur ISIS-inspired cell of 10 people was recently arrested, and another man was arrested Thursday.
There has not been a terrorist incident at an Olympics since the Centennial Park bombing in Atlanta in 1996. Rio’s security budget has been cut, and the police do not seem a trustworthy force.
This is where things truly get dark. This is what you really worry about. But the most common thread of every story in the lead up to these Games is a country that is too beset by its crashing economy and its culture of corruption to be in full control of events. It feels dark, even a violation, to imagine the worst consequences out loud. Day 17: The Closing Ceremony. The end of the marathon. By the end of an Olympics, as a journalist, you want to kill everyone you see and hug everyone you see, and you want to go home so badly and you never want to leave. The best-case is the Games go as smoothly as they can, that the worst doping isn’t caught until re-tests between now and 2024.
The best case is the Olympics only leave behind a disastrous fiscal legacy that accelerates Brazil’s devastating economic crash. The con of the Olympics, with its colossal commitments that cannot be broken in the event of catastrophe, has been laid bare, and the stories of post-Olympics Brazil will be dark and sad.
The best case is that the Olympics do not break, and that Brazil does not break.
Good luck, everybody.