By Anna Jean Kaiser / New York Times
RIO DE JANEIRO—It is not uncommon for the Olympics to leave behind some unneeded facilities. Rio, however, is experiencing something exceptional: Less than six months after the Summer Games ended, the host city’s Olympic legacy is decaying rapidly.
Empty Olympic buildings abound, puncturing any uplifting buzz from the competitions last summer. At the Olympic Park, some stadium entrances are boarded up and screws are scattered on the ground. The handball arena is barricaded by metal bars. The broadcast center remains half disassembled. The warm-up pool is decorated with piles of dirt and puddles.
Deodoro, a neighborhood in Rio’s poor periphery, has the second-largest cluster of Olympic venues. The canoe slalom course was to be converted into a giant public swimming pool. It closed to the public last December. Now residents fill plastic pools a few hundred feet away.
“The government put sugar in our mouths and took it out before we could swallow,” said Luciana Oliveira Pimentel, a social worker from Deodoro, while her children played in a plastic pool. “Once the Olympics ended, they turned their backs on us.”
Olympic officials and local organizers often boast about the legacy of the Games—the residual benefits that a city and country will experience long after the competitions end. Those projections are often met with skepticism by the public and by independent economists, who argue that Olympic bids are built on wasted public money. Rio has quickly become the latest, and perhaps most striking, case of unfulfilled promises and abandonment.
“It’s totally deserted,” said Vera Hickmann, 42, who was at the Olympic Park recently with her family. She lamented that although the area was open to the public, it lacked basic services.
“I had to bring my son over to the plants to go to the bathroom,” she said.
At the athletes’ village, across the street from the park, the 31 towers were supposed to be sold as luxury condominiums after the Games, but fewer than 10 percent of the units have been sold. Across town at Maracanã Stadium, a soccer temple, the field is brown and the electricity has been shut off.
“The government didn’t have money to throw a party like that, and we’re the ones who have to sacrifice,” Hickmann said, referring to local taxpayers.
In the preparations for the Games, the city of Rio promised “no white elephants”. The arena that hosted taekwondo and fencing was to be transformed into a school. Two other arenas were to be taken apart, and one put back together as four schools in another area. None of that has happened.
The mayor’s office said those plans were still in the works, but it did not offer a specific timetable.
The decay of Olympic venues is happening as a financial crisis engulfs federal, state and municipal governments. “The nation is in crisis, Rio de Janeiro is in crisis—it’s time to be cautious,” Marcelo Crivella, who became mayor on January 1, told incoming city council members.
“Spending is prohibited,” he added.
Rio’s mayor during the Games, Eduardo Paes, was among the strongest evangelizers of an Olympic legacy. He said in an e-mail it was too soon to call any of the sites white elephants and that “the path to implementing a legacy has been given”.
After the Games, the city of Rio held an auction for private companies to bid on administering the Olympic Park, but there were no bidders. This left the Ministry of Sport, an organ of the federal government, with the financial burden. The minister of sport, Leonardo Picciani, said in an interview that the agency’s goal was to find a private company to take over the park, but since there has been no interest, it is the government’s responsibility to maintain such venues.
Picciani also said the stadiums would not become burdensome relics, pointing to several sporting events at Olympic Park scheduled for this year, along with sports training programs.
Renato Cosentino, a researcher at the Regional and Urban Planning Institute at the Federal University of Rio, who studies the Olympic Park region, said the park “was born as a white elephant”, because it was built in a far-flung wealthy suburb that is home to only about 5 percent of Rio’s 6.3 million residents.
Having the majority of investment there, he said, proves the Olympics were meant to serve real-estate developers, who took on much of the construction for the Games in exchange for being able to build on the land afterward, in what is known as a public-private partnership.
Image credits: NYT