Rising crime, filthy water, soaring expenses: Is Rio really ready?

RIO DE JANEIRO >> When the Inteational Olympic Committee awarded Riou2009de Janerio the 2016u2009Olympic Games on Oct.u20092, 2009, in Copenhagen, Brazil’s then-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was so overcome with emotion that he couldn’t stop sobbing, spending much of a post-aouncement press conference with his face buried in a white handkerchief.

“You catch up quickly to what this means for the city, for the country, for the continent,” Carlos Arthur Nuzman, head of the Rio bid organizing committee, told the president.

The question as the first Olympicu2009Games held in South America open Friday is whether Rio’s 17-day center stage tu in the global spotlight will have the same meaning for the city and Brazil as Nuzman envisioned on that golden Danish evening nearly seven years ago.

Nuzman was right in this regard: The 2016u2009Games and their legacy will likely define Rio and Brazil for decades, either cementing Brazil as a major global player or revealing a city and nation that could not bear the political and financial burden of hosting three inteational mega-events — the 2007 Panu2009American Games, the 2014u2009World Cup and the Olympics — in less than a decade.

The success or failure, the long and short-term impact of the Riou2009Games also will further shape the IOC’s already taished image and the organization’s attitude toward awarding future games to developing countries.

“The huge cost of all this — a cost boe ultimately by the population — is now evident so much so that I’d argue that the biggest legacy of the Riou2009Olympics is the way it raised, loud and clear, questions about the impact of these games,” Juliana Barbassa, author of “Dancing With the Devil In the City of God: Riou2009de Janeiro on the Brink,” wrote in an email. “Why do they have to be so big, so expensive? What does the host city really gain? I think those questions will resound for a long time.”

More than even the Worldu2009Cup, the awarding of the Olympics seemed to aounce Brazil’s arrival on the inteational stage, its emergence from the shadow of the military junta that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985 and a series of economic crises that rocked the nation in the 1990s.

“What it was in a sense was recognition of Brazil as a prominent global player,” said Mark Langevin, director of the Brazil Initiative at Georgeu2009Washington University. “Confirmation of the rise of Brazil.”

Nuzman and Brazil had reason to be optimistic in 2009. The Brazilian economy was among the 10u2009largest on the planet, and, according to a 2001u2009Goldman Sachs study, one of the four fastest growing.

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But the Rio that will host the 2016u2009Games is a much different place than the city that beat Madrid in a landslide on a third IOC ballot nine years earlier. Violent crime is on the rise in the Olympic host city. Brazil is in the midst of its longest recession since the 1930s, and a corruption scandal has rocked the govement with President Dilma Rousseff suspended and facing impeachment.

Less than two months before the games, the Rio state’s acting goveor said the state was bankrupt, its finances in a “state of calamity.” The federal govement had to loan the state $849u2009million to cover Olympic-related infrastructure and security costs.

The Zika virus has Brazil facing its worst health crisis since 1918, according to the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, a health research foundation affiliated with Brazil’s ministry of health.

On top of all this, the price tag for the Rio Olympics has reached $20u2009billion, according to the Council of Foreign Relations, and will almost certainly ultimately top $25u2009billion, $10u2009billion more than the $14.45u2009billion originally budgeted, according to Rio bid documents.

“Here you have the province of Rio, which is bankrupt,” said Phil Powell, associate dean of Indiana University’s Kelly School of Business. “This is like the state of Indiana being bankrupt and hosting the Olympics. You can’t provide police services, roads can’t be kept up, and everything you’re doing is being slapped together with straw and Band-Aids.”

Langevin, however, said the Olympics have already reshaped Rio.

“Rio seized this moment to transform the way the city is structured,” Langevin said. “There’s been tremendous improvements in housing, public transportation and urban mobility.”

But Barbassa and other longtime Brazil watchers question whether Rio’s chance at global glory has already slipped away.

“Rio embodied this sense that Brazil’s moment might be passing before it arrived,” Barbassa wrote in her book.

Even Rio Mayoru2009Eduardo Paes admits, “This is missed opportunity. This is not the Rio we wanted the world to see.”

The $849u2009million loan from the federal govement came at a time when schools and state universities have been shut down and staffing at local hospitals slashed. Terrorism conces have shifted police to areas with heavy Olympic-related traffic. Rio police also have gone without pay and even have had to pay for the gas for patrol cars.

Not surprisingly crime is up, especially in impoverished areas where brutal drug gangs are reasserting themselves after purges by police special forces units in recent years.

Rio has also failed to make good on the promise the bid organizing committee made to the IOC that 80u2009percent of the city’s overall sewage would be collected and treated by 2016 as part of a proposed $4u2009billion project to improve Rio’s basic sanitation infrastructure.

“The preparation for the Olympics has made Rio a more unequal city,” Barbassa said. “It led to increased investment in the highest-rent neighborhoods, and to removals of favelas. Programs that would have improved the quality of life of its citizens, particularly the poorest, like the pollution clean-up of the (Guanabara) Bay, were simply not carried out.”

Langevin acknowledged “Brazil overpromised in both the Olympics and Worldu2009Cup. But if they hadn’t, Chicago would have won (the Olympic) bid. They promised too much, but they also recognized it’s a global game. (The city’s transformation) is way beyond what people in Rio thought (possible) 20u2009years ago.”

Langevin, like Paes and Rio organizing committee officials, remains optimistic about the city’s post-Olympic future. The games, he said, will bring benefits the city might not see “for a couple of years if not decades.”

“The big question,” he said, “is can Rio take this opportunity and really parlay it into an opportunity in improving the standard of living of its population?”