2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro

[john]

It is Olympics time again.





Problems, problems as the games approach. Hopefully the naysayers will be proved wrong and the Olympics with be a success.

The Rio Olympics haven’t even kicked off yet and there’s already a sense that they’re going to be a massive disaster. Things have gone far beyond the now-standard stories of Olympic village construction snafus into serious health and safety concerns. After a number of muggings and the entire security apparatus for the games being replaced last second, a segment of the internet has already started referring to the event as ‘The Apocalympics.’

Another worrisome nickname: Guanabara Bay, where many Olympic water competitions are set to take place, is being called ‘The Toilet Bowl of Rio.’ A number of large news outlets have done exposés on the situation, including the country’s own press. A few days ago, they noted a storm drain still discharging feces directly into the bay a mere 250 feet from the Olympic Flame pavilion. http://uproxx.com/sports/olympics-water-...ove-water/

Zika virus

Zika is a mosquito-borne virus that makes about one in five infected people sick with rash, fever, joint pain, or pinkeye and has been linked to the birth defect microcephaly, a neurological condition in which a newborn child’s head is significantly smaller than normal. Zika can cause the muscle-weakening disease Guillain-Barré syndrome in adults. http://www.zika-news.com/link.php?url=ht...ign=buffer

[Miguel]

There have been a couple of attempted assaults on torch bearers too. There's also a new subway line that's not likely to be completed in time.

(AP) — A $3 billion subway expansion built as one of the main Olympic legacy projects for Rio de Janeiro was overbilled by 25 percent, a report said Thursday.

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Corruption tied to the Olympics has made me look at the event as just another sports-oriented business. It's crazy how much debt countries take on to support it.

RIO DE JANEIRO — How do Brazilians feel about their big Olympic moment?

First there’s the anger: Rioters pelted the Olympic torch relay with rocks as it approached Rio de Janeiro, while bumper stickers have rearranged the Olympic rings into a four-letter word.

Then there’s the anxiety: With gallows humor amid a crime wave and fears of terrorism, a bingo game is circulating for people to wager on which day during the Games an attack will occur.

And the indifference: The media giant Globo won’t even bother to broadcast the Olympics during the coveted Sunday afternoon slot, opting instead for domestic soccer. A sizable number of hotel rooms here remain unreserved, forcing travel agents to slash rates in a desperate attempt to entice Brazilians to come.

“Just thinking of the Olympics leaves me revolted,” said Ana Caroline Joia da Souza, 21, a street vendor who sells sweets in front of a Rio metro station. “Our politicians want to trick the world into thinking things are great here. Well, let the foreigners see for themselves the filth we live in, the money our leaders steal.”

It is something of a ritual in countries that host the Olympics to engage in soul-searching on the eve of the Games. And Brazil is no exception, unleashing a withering exploration of the country’s political, economic and ethical troubles ahead of the opening ceremony on Friday.

Nearly two-thirds of Brazilians — 63 percent — think hosting the Olympics will hurt the country, according to a recent survey by the polling company Datafolha. Only 16 percent said they were enthusiastic about the Games, while 51 percent said they had no interest in them.

The grim mood stands in stark contrast to the ebullience shown in 2009 when Rio landed the Olympics. At the time, Brazil was basking in its triumphs — including a growing presence on the world stage, the lifting of millions of poor people into the middle class and the maturing of its young democracy after 21 years of military rule that had ended in 1985.

But, today, the Olympics are competing with both a harrowing recession and Brazil’s other public spectacle: bare-knuckled political dysfunction.

The country has not one, but two presidents: Dilma Rousseff, who was suspended to face impeachment proceedings that will continue to unfold during the Games, and Michel Temer, her interim replacement. Both Ms. Rousseff, a leftist, and Mr. Temer, who is shifting to the right, are deeply unpopular around the country. In fact, voters are fuming about the entire political establishment.

The leaders who envisioned the Olympics as an opportunity for Brazil to swagger in the international spotlight, including Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the former president who has been one of Brazil’s most influential political figures, are mired in scandals.

Mr. da Silva, universally known as Lula, is about to go on trial on charges that he tried to obstruct the investigation of a colossal graft scheme at Petrobras, the national oil company.

Now Mr. da Silva’s handpicked successor, Ms. Rousseff, faces an impeachment trial on claims that she manipulated the budget to conceal mounting economic problems. The scandals have developed against a backdrop of economic wretchedness: The unemployment rate surged to 11.3 percent in July, compared with 6.5 percent at the end of 2014, with companies laying off thousands of workers a day.

Rio de Janeiro, which just a few years ago boasted an economy turbocharged by offshore oil discoveries, is now the epicenter of Brazil’s worst economic crisis in decades. Struggling to pay civil servants and pensioners after squandering a bonanza of oil royalties, the leaders of the state of Rio de Janeiro recently declared a “state of calamity” because of its collapsing public finances.

The run-up to the Olympics has been marked by such a long and varied list of fiascos — from protests over forced evictions to complaints about both thefts and plumbing debacles at the new Olympic Village — that the British sports historian David Goldblatt ranks the preparations here among the worst in Olympic history.

In an effort to bolster security in Rio during the Games, the federal government is deploying thousands of troops to patrol the crime-weary city. But critics say that bringing in soldiers from violence-ravaged cities in northeast Brazil could embolden gang activity there and in other parts of the country.

Mindful of the dilemma, the Brazilian authorities shifted their plans this week and sent more than 1,000 troops to the state of Rio Grande do Norte in the country’s northeast, hoping to quell attacks by a prison-based gang on public buildings and buses.

Challenges aside, some argue that the Olympics are just what Brazil needs to bring it out of its slump.

Supporters say the traditional Olympic narrative often involves an escalation of tension before the Games, only to be replaced by excitement once they are underway. There are also those who say the country needs to stop complaining and start enjoying the spectacle.

“Everyone wanted the Games here when we got them, so all the criticism now is hypocritical,” said Cleide Correa, 72, a real estate broker in Rio de Janeiro. “Of course they spent a lot of money to organize this, but that’s the case in every host country. We need to make the best of the situation now.”

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/05/world/....html?_r=0

[Tusk]

With world travel the way it is, how easy something can turn from epidemic to pandemic, I'm really surprised this is moving forward from all the dire reports of how harmful and toxic the environment is reported to being. I would think that countries would want to put travelers coming from Rio into some kind of isolation before being allowed to be introduced to the general population....

I think everyone has known the levels of corruption the organizing bodies of world sports like the Olympics and Fifa are...it's all about the cash at the cost of a county's economy and the blood and sweat of cheap labor.... I haven't watched the Olympics for ages

[john]

[Tom22]

We're lucky to have the Rule of Law and the dedicated attention to infrastructure over the hundreds of year in the US.

Personal extra take.... I think it's exceedingly difficult for a country to have infrastructure improve as quickly as burgeoning populations in high birth-rate countries...although I suppose we managed it at some times of high immigration here (although we had many attrocious slums for immigrants in the late 1800s here too in those periods

[john]

A Google project Rio: Beyond the Map. "Step inside the unexpected world of the favelas".

360* panning ability once you get on the motorcyles.

https://beyondthemap.withgoogle.com/en-us/