Bruce Arthur
The beauty of Brazil is in the message,
So, Rio. The money ran out and the problems piled up and still the Olympics come, whatever the price. The opening ceremony is the real start; after this it is truly irrevocable. In Brazil, unlike Beijing or London, the budget was tight. Unlike anywhere else, it was South American. These are Brazil’s Games, the first of their kind. And probably the last, for a long while.
But here we are. The International Olympic Committee will seek ever safer places after this, probably. Getting this far was hard, and may continue to be hard.
Rio 2016, though, opened with such a beautiful and earnest song; they tried for big things, made with such small things. They call it gambiarra here, and the old TV show MacGyver was mentioned in both the pre-ceremony press conference and the official ceremony guide. Make something out of whatever you can; stitch it together, make it work.
That may be these Games. The budgets shrank as the economy crashed, and the government was toppled, and the whole thing feels just a little tenuous as the messy stuff burbles up and doesn’t stop. Earlier in the day the torch was rerouted because of protests in Copacabana. The buses to the stadium were a lottery — some stopped to ask for directions, several circled the stadium like a cat before it sleeps, and finally stopped. A Sky News reporter said he heard a kayaker had overturned while training after hitting a partly submerged sofa. It was unclear if it was true. But because we are in Rio, where the open water is billed as a roiling stew of garbage, viruses and bodies, it sounds true.
In the days before Friday, a Chinese group narrowly avoided a live firefight; a Russian diplomat allegedly shot a robber, which the Russians denied, as is custom. As the ceremony grew closer, Buzzfeed live-streamed a protest headed towards the stadium, which ended in tear gas. Another one, elsewhere, met the same fate.
Michel Temer, the massively unpopular and corruption-drenched acting president who oversaw the impeachment of the previous president earlier this year, was not introduced; Globo newspaper reported he was afraid to be booed in front of the world. (He was later, when he declared the Games open.) Pele, Brazil’s single most iconic human, couldn’t make it due to ill health. There will be scrapes as this thing goes forward. The question is how big, how many, how bad, what kind of sparks get thrown off.
The ceremony, though: it was so earnest, so optimistic. These things are always songs to the world and, like the Olympics, it’s easier to do it if you have all the money in the world, too. Rio’s low-budget song included its art, its beauty, its energy, its cool, its party, and Gisele’s majestic, confident final catwalk, still one of the most awe-inspiring things any country could conjure. Like Rio, parts of this ceremony were really beautiful.
The ceremony also included Brazil’s indigenous people, the arrival of Europeans, the legacy of slavery, the integration of immigrants from the Middle East and the Far East both, the voice of the favelas. It rose to a party, where everyone got along. Creative director Fernando Meirelles had said that in a time of Donald Trump, Brexit and the political tension in Brazil and the world, he wanted to show tolerance was the answer.
These things are, so often, how we would like to see ourselves.
Of course, everyone sings the diversity song; some even believe it. But this ceremony thought bigger, beyond Brazil. It featured maps inspired by NASA climate charts, showing the planet cooking by degrees, and a call to replant trees in the nation where the Amazon, lungs of the planet, still shrinks every year. The Olympic torch, rather than the gargantuan belching things everyone else deploys, was a relative spark in the centre of a sculpture representing solar power.
Meirelles wasn’t kidding when he said Trump wouldn’t like this ceremony, and tape-delayed NBC showed it in America. Politically, it was probably the most urgently aspirational thing put in an opening ceremony in history, aside from the traditional and generally futile calls for world peace. It was, in this country where falling oil prices have cratered its economy, a call to save the world.
“We are appealing to the world about this impasse on the planet,” said Meirelles. “The whole planet is under threat. The human race is under threat. So there are strong aspects of this.”
Rio isn’t the festering hell-pot that every report indicated. Yes, there are favelas spread over miles, giant gulfs of inequality, dangerous places. But the people are generally wonderful, and the Games likely won’t break completely, because that requires catastrophe at a greater level. They created beauty with whatever money they had, on this night. Maybe they can keep doing it.
The Tongan flag-bearer stole the show without a shirt. The cheers for the refugee team were so loud. The cheers for Brazil, seconds later, were bigger. They booed the mention of three levels of government, though, and Olympic committee chief Carlos Nuzman said that IOC president Thomas Bach “has always believed in the sex, success of the 2016 Olympic Games!” Beautiful.
These will be the sewage Games, the doping Games, the poverty Games, the corruption Games. (In fairness, there is a lot of competition for the title of the corruption Games.) It may have been a mistake, coming here. But for one night you could faintly see what Brazil had hoped for when they got the Olympics, in the good times. We are long past the idea that the Games could help Brazil. Things will probably worsen after the world leaves.
It was a wonderful night, though. We’re all here for the next three weeks, and let’s see if we can get through the whole thing together.