Very Important Blah Blah Blah

Sometime recently, IOC VVIP John Coates called the Rio 2016 preparations the worst ever. Much is being made of this statement but we need to put it in its proper context and to not take the commentary at face value. 

True, Rio 2016 is behind schedule on everything and as I suggested a few months ago should be called Rio Twentysomething. Building for the Olympic Games never happens the same way twice and never in the same place twice, so the demands and issues that Rio 2016 are dealing with are unique and there have apparently been very few inputs from the IOC to help them figure out how to “deliver”. So now, Gilberto Felli is coming to our collective rescue. The organized, demanding European, swooping in to save the skins of the organizing committee. 

Considered in this context Coates´ extremely unhelpful comments are similar to Valcke´s kick up the arse comments of a few years ago that caused such furor in Brazil. This time, the Lord Mayor of Rio has kowtowed saying that the criticisms need to be accepted but that everything will be done properly for the Lords of the Rings. How will this happen? The IOC and international federations are now sending in their technical experts to whip the undisciplined Brazilians into shape for their party. That this is happening only now is an indication of the lack of this “expertise” before. So, knowing full well how Brazil works, why is it only now that the IOC is sending in their special troops to help out only in 2014? In this sense we must take Coates´ blabbing barb as a self-criticism of the IOC´s lack of understanding about how things do or do not work in Brazil and for their incapacity to get things moving fast enough for their tastes. 

The other element of Coates´ commentary to consider is that high ranking  IOC members have made made no comment (sympathetic, antagonistic, or otherwise) about the recent wave of police violence in Rio. There is no secret that the security apparatus of Rio is being restructured for the Games but when this system fails tragically, there are few notes of concern sounded by the Games alarmists. What is at stake here in Coates´commets is not just the realization of Rio 2016 but the preservation of the IOC´s image and that of their sponsors. Does the IOC trumpet the fact that the Rio State Military Police have contracted the Austrian gun maker Glock to be their official 9mm supplier for Olympic security? Hardly. Death by handgun is not an Olympic pillar, though shooting is an Olympic sport. Coates is hedging the IOC´s reputation by focusing the blame on the Brazilians. 

In the frenetic run up to #WC14 and #Rio16 the existential angst of international sports federations is coming to a frothing boil. The narratives of lateness and unpreparedness are always the same, unless they have to do with places like Germany or London or Sydney. Will the unruly subalterns spoil the party with their ineptness and lack of organization? Will the IOC have their stage properly mounted and the places at the banquet table properly set? Frankly, I´m not concerned. 

Of course, Rio 2016 is late, the projects are poorly conceived and almost impossible to execute, but they have been so since the very beginning. The Rio 2016 Bid Book is a farce of a planning document projected by a public relations team to attend to the utopian fantasies of the IOC (and the sport mega-event industrial complex and their partners in Brazilian industry and government). If the IOC had done their due diligence, if they had people to critically evaluate the bid books, Rio wouldn´t be hosting the Olympics (after having finished fifth behind Doha in the technical evaluation). However, in the realpolitik of the IOC,  the overarching meta-narrative of urban transformation and opening new frontiers for sport blinded them to the realities of what it takes to put on an Olympics in a city as troubled, fragile and contested as Rio de Janeiro. Perhaps that would be an appropriate self-criticism for the VVIPs to take up. 

So, yes, Mr. Coates, we get the message loud and clear. Brazil is slow, maybe even lazy, much worse than those retrograde Greeks! If only Athens had been ready with everything on time their national economy would surely be thriving today and the crushing debt imposed by hosting the Games would have been forgiven. Excuse me if I don´t feel sorry for the IOC, but rather for the Cariocas who will be forced to bear the impacts, costs and burdens of the Olympics once Mr. Coates has gone to Tokyo to talk about how well everything has gone. 

Rio Twenty Something

Brazil is desperate for some good news that doesn´t come from its entertainment pages. The economy has been sacked by Dilma and the PT, the “pacification” program in Rio is proving that it does not, in fact, make sense to replace one arbitrary, militarized system of justice with another, the World Cup organizers are entering into full-scale damage control and the Olympic projects are so far behind schedule before they even get started that Rio 2016 might change its name to Rio Twenty Something.

The depressing state of affairs in the run in to the World Cup is making everyone quite anxious for the Cup to actually get going. It will be a huge relief to be able to talk about football for a month, though of course there will be protests and violence and human rights violations, arbitrary arrests, massive confusion at the airports, teams getting lost on the way to their hotels and the trumpeting cacophony of the world´s largest herd of white elephants.

We discovered this week that airplanes will not be adding to this noise. As a “security measure” all airports within a 7 km radius of WC elephants will be closed for up to seven hours before and during matches. Why 7 km? Surely it is not for security reasons as a plane could zip into a stadium as easily from 10 km as it could from 7 and there are not yet plans to have anti-aircraft missiles on rooftops. No, the reason for the cancellation of more than 800 flights is to prevent airplane noise from interfering with game transmission. At least there won´t be long waits to get baggage.

The Lord Mayor Eduardo II of São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro decreed public holidays on all WC game days, cancelled all permits for cultural events between May 22 and July 18, and suspended all public works projects for the same period. That means that there will be no work done on any Olympic related projects, no improvements to city infrastructure, no hammering of any kind for two months. While it will be quieter, what will all of the workers do? Will they be receiving their salaries for staying at home with their kids? The banishment of residents from their own city is what is going to make the World Cup possible – just another form of accumulation by dispossession.

Has everyone fully swallowed the bitter pill of the Sochi Games? Watching the closing ceremonies of the Paralympic Games last night, I could envision the map of Russia that served as the podium growing to

Putin´s message to the West

incorporate Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Sochi 2014 has served as a delightful soft power cover for Putin to pursue his hard power geo-politics. All the while the IOC sits on its pudgy golden ringed fingers, extolling the hackneyed virtuosity of the European aristocracy as a viable model for conflict resolution within the context of a brazenly cynical political economy of global sport.

The latest to add his name to the increasingly long roll of kleptomaniac shysters in Brazilian sport is Ary Graça, ex-president of the Brazilian Volleyball Conferderation and ex-president of the International Volleyball Association. Graça was caught out by ESPN Brasil reporter Lucio de Castro to the tune of R$10,000,000. Graça then renounced his two presidencies but will not likely face any kind of legal action (of course). The person Graça had received his position from, 2016 President Carlos Nuzman, said he was “surprised” just before he took a position on the ethics board of the International Association of Athletics Federations. Asked what more he was surprised about that day, Nuzman revealed his pleasure at seeing the sun rise in the East. 

Tokyo 2020

A year ago I wrote a post predicting that Istanbul would get saddled with the 2020 Olympics. That was before I had been to Istanbul. That was before Taksim. That was before the Vinegar Revolt. A year ago, the mega-event monolith appeared to be ready to roll on eternally, ever citius, altius, fortius. Now, the IOC is heading to Asia for efficient Games delivery. As our friends at Play the Game pointed out, Tokyo 2020 will be the fifth IOC event in Asia since 2008 (Beijing 2008, Singapore 2010, Nanjing 2014, Pyeongchang 2018 and Tokyo 2020).

There are very simple reasons to explain the way the Olympic vote went. In 2012, Istanbul was well in the lead with Turkey growing at more than 5%, living a closed-condominium, car-dependent, consumerist dream articulated by a right wing government that wanted to use the Games to open up new urban frontiers for real-estate speculation. Sound familiar? Then, the Erdogan government went too far, trying to eliminate Taksim Square by using ultra-violence to crush popular expression to further the goals of a religiously capitalist autocracy. The repressive measures of Erdogan’s police forces effectively turned the secular middle-class against the Olympic project. These are precisely the people that need to be convinced to gamble their savings on poorly planned“legacy” projects.

The increasingly well-articulated resistance to the Istanbul bid went well beyond Games criticism, highlighting the larger urban-political project underway. The future of Istanbul is up for grabs right now and the awarding of the Games to an authoritarian and repressive regime would have signaled the IOC´s explicit approval of Erdogan´s government.

A month after Taksim, Brazil exploded during the Confederations Cup, with protesters targeting FIFA and the IOC as parasitic aliens. The delays, enervating bureaucracy, lack of transparency and keystone cops organization of the Brazilians were already major concerns for both of the Swiss hegemons. The presence of millions of agitated people in the streets when the very idea of a mega-event is to banish locals to their houses was a major wake up call. With higher than 25% unemployment in Madrid, what would the Spanish capital have looked like after the Olympic announcement? More practically, with more than 70% of the installations already built, where was the possibility for “urban transformation” that so enchants the European aristocracy on Mount Olympus?

So we were left with Tokyo. The Japanese economy has, by some measures, been stagnant for two decades. However, the Japanese have the world’s highest literacy rates, lowest crime, greatest life expectancy and aside from Fukushima, brilliant infrastructure. Does anyone doubt that the Games will be delivered on time? Does anyone question whether or now Olympic spending will significantly alter the course of the Japanese economy? Tokyo is the largest city in the world, will the majority of people even notice the Olympics in their daily lives? No, no and no. Three shakes of the head, one big nod for Tokyo.

The rub is that perceived political, economic and social stability are likely to be major keys to the selection of mega-events in the future. Gerome Valcke has suggested that countries have a plebiscite before being allowed to host, that way when spending goes through the roof and white elephants plop down FIFA can say, “look here, you voted for this.” But clearly, a yes or no vote is not a sufficient criterion for hosting mega-events. “Democracy” would merely function to exclude everyone that voted against it. This is the same way that Erdogan, Bush, Paes, Cabral, etc. conceive(d) of their democratic mandates. Something longer term, more consensual, more progressive than democracy has to be in place to minimize the damage of these events.

The massive, ongoing protests in Brazil have shown that mega-events may have reached the apogee of their gigantism, arrogance, and general indifference to the lives of the people who subsidize the party and profits of the global elite. The threats of protest in Istanbul and Madrid, in addition to geo-political and economic considerations, made Tokyo 2020 happen in ways that were nearly unthinkable a year ago. Brazilians can be proud of their role in drawing global attention to the plight of mega-event hosts.  

The MAR and the mar

The Rio city government recently invested R$80.000.000 in the MAR, Museu do Arte do Rio. Mar is also the portuguese Word for ocean. To run the MAR, the city pays one million a month to Brazil’s biggest media company to run the museum and they still charge admission to city residents (though not on Tuesdays when it is open to everyone for free).  It is a lovely museum, perfectly situated in front of the cruise ship passenger terminal at Pier Mauá. In a future post we will take up some of the surprisingly progressive and interesting elements of the MAR. 

After a visit to the MAR, I left Flamengo to take some precious house guests to the international airport, some 24 kilometers distant. Just after hitting the road, the skies unleashed a Biblical torrent. The city closed down as nearly every important highway flooded, all public transportation came to a halt, trees crashed, power outed and the city reeled from surging sewage.

The body count was relatively low: 4 dead 2 1 missing. One of the dead was a Polish woman who had the temerity to lead against a light post in the Largo do Machado and died from an electric shock. She had just moved to Brazil with her husband.

In addition to the smaller roads in Catete, Gloria, and the typical inundation of Tijuca and the Praça da Bandeira, Avenida Brasil, the main east-west highway flooded at its strategic entracnce that brings together traffic flows from the south and from Niteroi. The meters` deep fetid stew completely engulfed cars and stranded traffic on all of the elevated highway system leading to the north and west of the city. There was no way forward and no way back. We were stuck without moving for three hours. A sign over the entrance to the bridge to Niteroi kept taunting us with a sign that flashed “Fluxo Bom” (good flow).

The brilliant idea of the city government is to take this elevated highway (which was the only option to get to the airport as trees had fallen over the access to the Santa Barbara tunnel, trapping cars inside), and put it below sea level as it runs alongside the port area. I have been railing against this idiocy from the beginning, but demolishing Rio`s port-area elevated highway to put it underground in a city that is prone to flooding is attaining lofty heights of quixotic skullduggery that not even my forked pen can reach.

Fortunately, I was in a car on my way to the airport after having spent a day at the museum. There were tens and hundreds of thousands who had worked long days, had crammed into non-air conditioned buses with no toilets, no way off, no food, no drink, and with no relief of the traffic in sight. My 24 km trajectory to the airport took 4 hours, something that I could have done with a kayak, paddleboard, skateboard, bicycle, or walking quickly.  Others didn`t get home until 3 or 4 in the morning only to get up and retrace their steps. Why is it that there is no plan to put public transportation to the international airport?

I desperately wanted someone to come by with their Euro-American clipboards to ask all of the people stranded in traffic or stuck in the metro or wading through sewage to ask which is the happiest city in the world…

The long and short of this post is that we have just spent 80 million to build a museum called MAR, but relatively nothing on dealing with water movement within the city itself. These are the kinds of perverse priorities or “unlucky realities” that don`t show up on the Mayor`s ill-conceived Monopoly game, but that have hugely negative impacts on the lives of Cariocas and visitors. 

Here it comes, again

It is a pity that more attention is not given to the Paralympics. This is likely a combination of fatigue after the Cyborg Games, combined with some preconceptions and prejudices about “disabled” sport. However, if we are (just for a moment) to think that the Olympics really possess positive, mystical, transformational powers then it is surely in the Paralympics that we see this most clearly manifested (though clearly with some Cyborg elements as well).

The Paralympics is full of eye-watering tales of human perseverance. The difficulties of training and high-level achievement are augmented by the daily rigors of “disability” (an admittedly terrible word to use for world-class athletes). The Brazilian athletes are to be doubly commended as they live and train in cities that are almost wholly inadequate for their daily needs: low levels of investment in sport, grave difficulties in social assistance and cities poorly structured for wheelchairs, the blind and the deaf.

It may be that one way to solve the problem of making the Olympic Games actually useful for a city is to host the Paralympics first. That way, we will have to ensure that the public transportation, sidewalks, restaurants, elevators, crosswalks, museum access, beach accesses, stadiums and hotels will attend to the needs and rights of the disabled before they meet the desires and demands of the International Overlords. We would also focus more attention on the real “human interest” stories found within sport, perhaps giving Bob Costas something meaningful to talk about. By making the Paralympics prelude, we can direct our attention to the people and projects that currently exist as afterthoughts.

This is all to say that the Paralympic flag arrives in Rio de Janeiro today. It is unclear whether it will make the same rounds as the Olympic flag, but I rather doubt it will go to the Complexo do Alemão which is almost completely inaccessible by wheelchair. 

(Vejam esse artigo no BBC Brasil sobre o projeto de transportes no Rio)

The Olympic Flag is made of Korean Silk

There are so many interesting things about the Olympic Flag that I am bursting with excitement to report that I gave away the punch line in the title. I was astounded that after so many years of researching the Olympic Games that something so elementary, so symbolic could have escaped my attention. Korean silk!!!! Who knew?

As the devoted readers of Hunting White Elephants will no doubt have heard, the London Games are over, save for the three weeks of Paralympics that receive almost no media attention whatsoever. The missile batteries might be coming down off the roofs and tourists will start heading back to London. The party cost British taxpayers more than 11 billion pounds, around 5x over the original budget. Eduardo Paes and the Rio team have learned that lesson well, now refusing to talk about the budget beyond what was presented in the Bid Books in 2009.

We do know that the original budget underwritten by Lula was R$31 billion. Can we go 5x over? Maybe. Part of the problem is identifying what is Olympic and what is World Cup, what is ordinary investment and what is related to the megas. When transportation systems are conveniently directed to serve the Olympics, they are part of the Games project. When they are part of the budget, they are not. Any and all increases in the Gross Product of Rio are attributed to the Games, any increase in water pollution is not. When projects make the numbers tick in the right direction for marketing, yeah Rio 2016! There are no other numbers.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter. There is no evidence to suggest that mega-events bring a public return on public investment. To the contrary, this is a regime of public risk for private profit that will use the militarization of urban space to control local populations and extract as much value from the city in the shortest timeframe possible before moving Istanbul for 2020.

Protest brining the 'evicitions trophy' to the mayor

The press conference yesterday was an interesting look into the way the 2016 Olympics will be run. As we received media credentials, we signed up to ask questions only to be informed later that only 5 questions would be allowed because the Governor, Mayor and Snoozman were tired after their flight from London. The questions were typical of the Brazilian media: innocuous, staged, soporific, irresponsible and stupid. The SporTV reporter asked the mayor to explain the emotion of brining the Olympic flag back to Rio. The Globo reporter asked if the mayor was going to bring the actual flag around the city or if they were going to use a replica. This gave him the chance to bring up the medal winning boxers as “security”, highlight the honor guard of the Guarda Municipal (wearing pith helmets), and to suggest that if the Olympic flag needed more security he “would have Cabral call in BOPE.”

The only decent question came from the BAND reporter, who, in response to the stimulation of the protest by the Comitê Popular outside the too-small, low-ceilinged INFAERO conference room (itself a testament to the poverty of investment in public infrastructure) asked about forced removals and the fate of the Vila Autódromo. This clearly irritated the mayor who leaped to his feet, protesting any suggestion that there had been at any time anything but democratic, open discussion with all of the communities removed for Rio’s Olympic project.

Conflating various key phrases of Paes, he said “there have been hundreds of people removed along the trajectory of the Transcarioca in the Zona Norte, middle class people, and no social activists were making a fuss about that because we did things democratically [HWE: removing individual houses is easier than removing whole communities]. We’ve bought land for the people of the Vila Autodromo [HWE: a project that the government had to go back on because the land belonged to one of Paes’ major campaign donors] and everyone is going to live in a nice apartment [HWE: whether or not they want to] only 500 meters from where they are now [HWE: this project is not going to happen]. No one is going to be removed violently [HWE: ask the people in Metrô, Restinga, Vila Harmonia, Recreio II about that!]. Once we deal with this situation we’ll see these political agitators disappear like they always do [HWE: taking a pot shot at his opposition in the coming elections].”

He added, “We need to move on from people resisting progress and cursing the government. This should be a thing of the past.” The elimination of alternative voices in the Olympic Era was well documented in London, another lesson learned. Of course, none of this addresses the wisdom or necessity of projects in and of themselves; project planned by a public relations firm in conjuntion with their governmental, meida and corporate bedfellows. A philandering foursome that goes alem do pornográfico.

There were some other tendencies on display that should be taken note of by journalists and researchers. In the blowing, normative discourses of Cabral, Snoozeman and Paes, there is a continual conflation of two presidents, Dilma and Lula. “O presidente” is Lula, “a presidenta” is Dilma, as if they were both governing at the same time. Lula’s role in bringing the Olympics is never far from the lips of those who drank so profusely from his overflowing cup of charming good-ol-boyism.

This is a closed circle of self-referential and self-interested parties where no contrary or alternative hymns will be sung. Thus, the World Cup slogan, Juntos num só ritmo, can be understood to refer to the larger political project of the Olympics as well as the elimination of alternatives. The Olympics take this to the next level.

On a positive note, after the press conference as the medalists put on display by the government were carrying their own bags to be stuck into a van (instead of the limousine escort afforded their lordships), the protestors from the Comitê Popular engaged them in conversation. All of them were adamant about their support for an Olympics without forced removals and for the production of peaceful and socially inclusive Games.

Here it comes!!

Below is a transcript from an interview with the journalist Lucy Jordan (www.lucy-jordan.com)about the impending, banalized brutality of Rio 2016.

Lucy Jordan (LJ): Do you think the process of preparing for mega-events such as the Olympics has been a positive thing for Rio? Why not? Can you think of any positive aspects to the 2016 Olympic games? 

Hunting White Elephants (HWE): Yes and no. There has been a lot of investment and the city is nearly at full employment, yet the projects under way will not attend the real needs of the city. The Rio 2016 project has become the effective master plan for the city: a dangerous move in a city with a historical lack of investment in basic infrastructure. Also the interventions are creating a dual city: the Olympic city vs. the Non-Olympic city. There are of course always positive aspects when a city receives such massive investment but how those investments are being directed and what their long term effects will be is another story.

LJ: Do you think Rio is prepared for the Olympics? What measures have been taken so far to prepare Rio? Have they been successful? What are the main obstacles that Rio will face in preparing and being ready in time?

HWE: No. Almost none. Of the four BRT lines, three of which were not part of the original project, the one that has come partially on line has killed five people in the past few months because people are using it as a bike path.Why? There are no bike paths in the region. The question about being ready on time is not completely relevant as the six-week demands of the Games tend to justify a thousand urban interventions that will not prepare the city for the demands of 2017 or 2025. The main obstacles are a lack of professionalism in management, conflicts of interest, bureaucratic obstacles, lack of public participation, lack of transparency, and a lack of planning for post-event uses.

LJ: What do you think will be the main similarities and differences between the London games and the Rio games, and why? Do you think that differences between Rio and London, and Brazil and the UK, will manifest themselves in the difference between the Rio games and the London games? How?

HWE: London’s Games happened in a large city with a relatively functional transportation network and very few physical alterations to the city’s infrastructure had to be undertaken. Rio has many more problems in this regard: transportation is fragile, sewage systems are inadequate, etc. Also there is no terrorist threat in Brazil, so the massive investments in security will be more to control local populations rather than to defend against external threats. Things will happen more spontaneously in Rio and the Brazilian penchant for big parties in public space will make the spirit of the completion more diffuse. Also, Rio is not as cosmopolitan as London so there might be more surprises in store for the wealthy international tourist class that frequents the Games.

LJ: Do you think that Brazilians, and in particular Cariocas, are excited about the 2016 games? Why/Why not? How has Rio reacted to the London games? Do you think Brazil will be able to top the success of the London games?

HWE: The Olympics are exciting and Cariocas are of course excited to have the opportunity to see the games happen on home soil. Yet there is a tremendous anxiety and lingering doubts about the capacity of games organizers and the government to act transparently, professionally, and with the best interests of the city residents at the front of their agendas. There hasn’t been much reaction in Rio to the London
Games as Olympic sports are not of great interest in Brazil. The sexualization of female athletes has dominated the amateurish coverage. Brazil’s medal count has been surprisingly low which has further diminished interest. Top the “success” of the London Games? In what sense? Organization, transportation, security, cost? Successful sporting events are easy enough to pull off, preparing the city for future demands should be the real measure of a Games’ success. London was 5x over budget, hugely militarized, corporatized, etc...now what? 

LJ: What do you think of AECOM’s design? Is had been lauded for sustainability – do you think this is warranted?

HWE: It depends on what sustainability means. 60% of the AECOM project will be given over to real-estate. This will be yet another car-dependent, closed condominium project in Barra de Tijuca. The densification of this wetland region is occurring without the required investment in sanitation or in effective public transportation projects. Without creating jobs in the region, residents will get in their cars to go to centers of employment = not sustainable. AECOM has done some interesting things given the parameters set by Rio 2016, including the urbanization of the Vila Autódromo community. The Vila Autódromo has developed a proposal for how this urbanization should occur, demonstrating that keeping the community in situ will be more economical and sustainable environmentally than removal.

LJ: What kind of lasting “legacy” do you think Brazil will be left with after the games are over? 

HWE: I don’t use the word “legacy” to describe the Olympic project. These are impacts. There will be a massive budgetary overrun, militarization and privatization of public space, huge investments in world-class sporting facilities that will not be supported by programs to develop athletes, transportation lines that fragment instead of connect the city, huge increases in rents, unused four and five star hotel rooms that were subsidized by the public, and millions of good memories for one of the most expensive parties in history. 

Look out!!!

Yet another countdown to the day when Rio finally becomes the Olympic city. As the torch fuel switches from BP to Petrobras, the terribly nice things that happen to prepare a city for the Olympics will start ratcheting up here. We do have the small distraction of the World Cup, in case anyone has forgotten about that, but let’s first take a look at some of the critical problems that need to be addressed in Rio.

  1)      The word “legacy”. Can we agree that this is not a good word to describe what happens when tens of billions of public money get funneled into urban projects designed by public relations firms? These are permanent structural transformations that are not predicated on needs but desires and hollow discourse.

  2)      The airport. This will be the only Olympic city, ever, that will not have a public transportation line that connects the international airport with the city. There is a plan to put a Bus Rapid Transit line between Barra de Tijuca and GIG, but are people going to get on a city bus with their bags? There will also be no public transportation between GIG and the domestic airport downtown. Duh. There will be no water taxi, no increase in ferry service, just a generalized clusterbumble (don’t even get me started about the Metro).

  3)      Maracanã. Currently undergoing the third reform in twelve years. Once the largest stadium in the world, it will have a capacity of 76,000 for the World Cup and will likely need to undergo further reforms for the Olympics. For instance, where will the Olympic torch go? The current reforms are going to be around R$1 billion (or more) and if we add the hundreds of millions in the other reforms, plus the destruction of a protected cultural monument…anyway, you get the idea.

  4)      Engenhão. There has been a movement to change the name of the stadium from Estádio Olímpico João Havelange to honor João Saldanha, the communist coach of the national team that was sacked just before the 1970 World Cup. The problem is that the stadium, a flying saucer that landed in the lower-middle class neighborhood of Engenho de Dentro, is called “Stadium Rio”. Thus removing the name of Brazil’s oldest criminal is moot.

  5)      Engenhão II. The area around the stadium has never received any intervention to improve access. Hundreds of millions will need to be spent, yet there is only a R$15 million line item in the budget.

  6)      Engenhão III. The track will probably have to be replaced. The television screens too. And the roof is in constant danger of falling. Oh, and because the Maracanã has been closed 3 of 4 big teams in Rio play there and have destroyed the grass, so some games have been cancelled.

  7)      Vila Autodromo. AECOM’s winning Olympic park project included the urbanization of the Vila Autodromo which occupies the north-west corner of the Olympic park site. The city and Rio 2016 are anxious to get the “favela” out of sight and out of mind and have been trying for more than a decade, without success. Now, the Vila Autrodromo has put forth an urbanization plan that demonstrates that it will be both cheaper and easier to urbanize in situ than to forcibly remove. Will the government engage?

  8)      Olympic Village. Being built in a swamp. Where will those 15,000 daily Olympic size poops go? Can we get the 100 meter turd float into the Games?

  9)      Cost. Let me get this straight…we pay taxes which were spent on the bid, spent on the infrastructure, running of the games, athlete training and over-blown administration. Then we have to pay to go to the games and pay for the maintenance of useless structures that we won’t have access to because they will be privatized? Even if there were a budget to be kept, we still end up paying four or five times for the Olympics.

  10)  Cost II. The World Cup is pushing frontiers in more ways than I can detail in this post, but have been keeping tabs on for some time. Imagina a Olim-piada!?! The same people that went 10x over budget with the Pan American Games have been given more money with fewer controls, why would we expect a different result?

  11)  Medals. Brazil, not doing so well in London (2 gold, 1 silver, 10 bronze, behind the powerhouses of New Zealand, Denmark, and Kazakstan, whose combined population is less than Rio de Janeiro’s). There is little or no effective investment in sport in this country. It is no accident that the most decorated Brazilian Olympian is a yachtsman, and that other medals come through various forms of fighting and football.  There is a dire, desperate need for a massive shake-up at the COB, but Nuzman is holding on for dear life. The media doesn’t hold his feet to the fire because expectations are so low, and therefore easy to meet.

Ok…enough for today, just getting the pump primed (again) for the transfer of focus.