Rosie DiManno
It’s all about the athletes, not the extravagance,
RIO DE JANEIRO— Out of the blocks. Games on.
Laser light show, dozens of cameras broadcasting the spectacle to at least a billion TV viewers around the planet, and A-C-T-I-O-N.
Not the sweaty, grunting kind, which arrives Saturday morning. But the Rio-centric panorama of an opening ceremony flush with salsa, allegory, favela rappers and Brazil’s most glamorous export — supermodel Gisele Bundchen channelling “The Girl from Ipanema.”
A planned skit of Gisele being robbed by a black teenager was ditched because it reinforced horrible stereotypes. Or maybe outsiders wouldn’t get the joke.
This was Rio reflected back to itself through a haze of smoke and mirrors. And projected outward to the world as it craves to be seen.
With a cordial welcome for the Greeks — who started it all, thus traditionally first out of the gate in the Parade of Nations — a smattering raspberry jeer for the drugscandalized Russians, a stirring embrace for the tiny contingent known as Team Refugee, picked from the diaspora of the displaced, and a deafening Ole Ola for Brazil inside Maracana Stadium.
Despite all the moaning and groaning, the dire predictions of disaster looming, the frantic last-minute preparations and a whole hunk of purported apathy from the local Cariocas — 1.5 million tickets remained unsold at the start of the week — Rio got its colourful, vivacious, sexy act together in time for Friday night’s hug-around opening lollapalooza.
It was hoopla and hype, Rio gorging itself on the festivities.
Team Canada, 300-plus strong, were in the thick of the jubilation — in their exceedingly dull dress uniforms — falling in behind flag-bearer Rosie MacLennan, trampoline gold medallist, defending.
Rio calls itself the cicade maravilhosa — wonderful city — and that’s no lie, though many truths have been squished out of the narrative in recent weeks, some 28,000 accredited journalists, with no actual sports to cover yet, going to town on the beat-up-Rio beat.
How fraught with multiple crises these Olympics have been. Which makes them little different from every other Games in memory. But if Athens, even more riven by woes, could manage to ready-set-go in 2004, then there was never any genuine risk that Rio would bollix the whole thing up.
With a half-million tourists expected over the coming fortnight, 200,000 spectators in the stadium and televisions tuned in around the globe, Rio could hardly hang out a sign: Come back later.
So they hung instead decorative hoarding around some of the slummy bits they don’t want anybody to see and shimmied to a percussive beat. Because Cariocas, who annually go Carnival bacchanal, know a thing or two about kicking up their stiletto heels. They are battle-hardened celebrants.
First Olympics in South America, so Rio — which was established when the entire Portuguese court plunked down here 200 years ago, then got stiffed out of its capital status when the government carved Brasilia out of the wild — is carrying the weight of a continent on its shoulders. If they flop, South Americans will never forgive them.
Hey, we could all be in Chicago instead, hardly the most placid place on Earth, which lost its hosting bid to Rio when these Games were awarded in 2009. At that time, Brazil’s economy was booming, military dictatorship was rapidly receding in the rear-view mirror, and self-confidence at a fever pitch. Showing off a prosperous Rio, with its gorgeous backdrop, was the objective.
The telegenic backdrop is still there. But seven years later, the self-confidence has shrivelled, recession grips hard, with seismic political instability and the president — kept far away from the opening ceremony — facing an impeachment trial next week.
And the Games bill has soared. Though, at an alleged $11.9 billion (U.S.), they’re downright frugal, with a slew of planned infrastructure projects — the legacy that was to have improved the lives of citizens — shelved. But the new subway extension to the Olympics venue hub did start moving this week, even if only those with Games accreditation can ride on it.
It’s understandable that a poll this week showed only 16 per cent of Brazilians are “enthusiastic” about the Olympics.
Anti-Olympic protests have been rampant. On Friday, the Olympic torch run — initiated by Nazi Germany, keep in mind — was diverted from its route to avoid clashing with demonstrators. Thursday evening, an un-Games concert was staged in a cavernous abandoned hall called the “Big Saucer.”
It has been ever thus, from the spoilsports and the activists, Vancouver six years ago no less.
You remember Vancouver. Even before those Olympics launched, snippy British journalists declared them Worst Games Ever. They turned out splendidly. So don’t pay too much attention to us, the frontline correspondents. We are characterized by ill will and the snarky blah, blah, blah. No axe too small to grind.
Not as lavish, the opening spectacle, as London or over-the-top Beijing, which spent $100 million putting on the ceremonial Ritz at the Bird’s Nest. Rio’s budget was reeled in from $114 million to $60 million, extending what has become the austerity theme of these “No Frills” Games.
Frankly, there’s been entirely too much frills and flamboyance from the Olympics, as they’ve grown outrageously garish, preposterously expensive, whilst paying lip service to the environment and sustainability. In Brazil, home to the Amazon forest, environmental virtue should actually matter. And that was a motif of the opening ceremonies, said executive director Fernando Meirelles. “The message is Brazil has the last garden in the world, which is the Amazon, and we need to protect that garden.”
Throw in swirls of colour, choreography, music, an expanse of bare flesh, hot-hot-hot women, and Vanderlei Cordeiro de Lima lighting the Olympic cauldron — what wasn’t to love?
The opening ceremony is an extravaganza that is a mile wide and an inch deep in flash. It’s not what the Games are about.
Rio 2016 will not flop. The athletes won’t allow it. Because they, as always, are what invests the Olympics with their meaning, however hokey the concepts of peace, harmony and fair play. Fairness — clean competition — might be as substantive as the Olympic truce urged upon nations at war, for just these two weeks. But the thrill of the Games is real, the blood and the sweat and the tears. And the joy.
I wonder if those athletes — golfers and tennis players primarily — who bailed on Rio watched the opening ceremony and regretted their absence.
With apologies to Amy Winehouse: They tried to make me go to Rio, I said no no no . . .
Nowhere else this girl would rather be.