Brazil plans emergency funds for Rio ahead of Olympic Games
BRASILIA: The Brazilian government planned to transfer 2.9 billion reais ($849 million) in emergency funds to the state of Rio de Janeiro to pay for infrastructure and security during the Olympic Games, a government official told Reuters yesterday.
A day earlier the governor of Rio declared a state of financial emergency as a drop in revenues caused by a crippling recession and a slump in oil prices has left state coffers depleted ahead of the Games that start on August 5.
The funds would be used to pay for security personnel and finish a much-delayed metro line to the Olympic venue, said the official familiar with the discussions, and who asked for anonymity because he was not allowed to speak publicly.
Rio’s financial crisis threatens to disrupt public services during the Olympics, when 500 000 foreign visitors are expected to visit the beach-side city known for its beauty.
The Brazil Olympics have already been marred by political turmoil that led to the suspension of President Dilma Rousseff and an outbreak of the mosquito-borne Zika virus that has been linked to brain malformation in babies.
The federal government was already considering an emergency loan to Rio after it missed several debt payments with multilateral banks in May.
Complicated
The missed payments complicated the release of a 1 billion-real loan from the state development bank, BNDES, to finish the Line 4 of the Rio metro system.
Interim President Michel Temer is expected to announce the emergency funds in a meeting tomorrow with several governors who are asking him for debt relief for their cashstrapped states.
SAO PAULO: Brazil’s failure to claim an Olympic soccer gold medal, the one major tournament they have never won, is all because Pele never played in the competition, the soccer great joked on Thursday.
Pele made his comments after receiving an Olympic award in his home town of Santos, pointing out that although Brazil had won the World Cup five times and the Copa America on eight occasions, they had never won Olympic gold because he was absent.
“I was joking with my friends, saying that Brazil never won an award because I never played,” the 75-year-old, three-time World Cup winner told reporters.
“I joke with my friends, because we really never had a title, and this was a chance God gave to me in receiving this honour. Let’s hope and think positively, that maybe we can take an Olympic title, and once again, for all those who have been part of my story.”
Pele was given the Olympic order, the highest award offered by the International Olympics Committee (IOC), by its president Thomas Bach.
Bach is in Brazil to monitor preparations for South America’s first Olympic Games.
VIENNA: Paralympic long jump champion Markus Rehm saw his dream of competing at the Rio Olympics fade on Friday after the IAAF said that the German had failed to prove that he does not gain an unfair advantage as a prosthesis-wearing athlete.
Nicknamed “Blade Jumper”, the 2012 Paralympics gold medallist and 2014 German national long jump champion was hoping to become the second athlete with a carbon fibre prosthesis to compete at the Olympics after South Africa’s Oscar Pistorius in 2012.
However, IAAF president Sebastian Coe, speaking at a news conference where Russia’s ban from the sport was extended, said: “He has to prove that the prosthetic he uses does not give him a competitive advantage, and at this stage he has not been able to do that.”
Rehm had commissioned a scientific study, hoping to prove he did not get an advantage, with a report last month indicating no clear edge over able-bodied athletes.
A new IAAF ruling requires amputee competitors to prove themselves that they do not have an advantage over able-bodied athletes.
The study was conducted by several universities in Germany, the United States and Japan and showed that amputees such as Rehm, who lost his lower right leg in a boating accident as a teenager, had a less efficient start, but a more efficient jump.
The 27-year-old jumped a para-athletics world record of 8.40 metres to win the 2015 IPC world title in Doha, a distance that would have beaten Britain’s 2012 London Olympics gold medallist Greg Rutherford by nine centimetres. – Reuters