On the Problems with the Rio Olympics July 27, 2016

Does this look like a venue fit for Olympic sailing and swimming?

Has the IOC learned its lesson yet (I’ll pause for laughter)?  Frankly, I would not hold out hope for this.  This is, after all, the same IOC that gave the Olympics to Nazi Germany in 1936 (both Winter and Summer Games).  That awarded the 1980 Summer Games to Moscow, the epicenter of the slave society bent on taking over the entire world (I mean Communism, of course).  They also awarded the 2008 Summer Olympics to Beijing despite the decades-long, grotesque train of human rights abuses on the part of Red China.

Then there was the disaster that was Sochi in 2014.  Leave aside the fact that Vladimir Putin has made every effort to cast himself in the mold of a Soviet Premier.

Focus instead on the grossly inadequate lodging; the issues with the available food; the $51 Billion overall boondoggle of hosting the Games; the subtropical climate (keep in mind these were Winter Olympics); the putrid water supply; the state-sanctioned killing of stray dogs, and, not to mention, the state-sanctioned doping of the Russian athletes (no wonder Russia came out of nowhere to win so many medals after so many mediocre performances in recent Winter Games).

Now the world is turning its attention to the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, and the train wreck it is rapidly becoming.  Granted, Rio holds a special mystique for people all over the world:  a megacity in beautiful, tropical surroundings, and miles of warm, sexy beaches.  Sounds great to host the Olympics there, right?  That is, it all sounds great until reality is considered. To wit:

Economically, the Brazil is in its worst recession since the 1930s, partly because of the declining oil prices on the world market.  Locally, Rio de Janeiro has declared a financial state of emergency.  Falling oil prices alone cannot be totally blamed for this crisis.  Indeed, a much larger factor is government corruption, a hallmark of Third World politics.  To that point, a major investigation into the state-controlled oil corporation Petrobas has already forced several government officials to step down.  That is good, but will their replacements be reform-minded?  The cynical side of me says, “don’t hold your breath.”  Still, the political corruption scandals leading up to the Games have already had considerable fallout, for even Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, faces impeachment.  That may be good for justice, but not good timing for a country to have a political crisis when it is about to host something as mammoth as the Summer Olympic Games.

As a side note, why does an oil company need to be state-controlled in the first place?  The free market, coupled with sensible regulation, has proven to be an effective means of governing, say, Chevron and ExxonMobil.  But this is what helps make the developed world the developed world.

In any case, health-wise, things are no better.  Yes, the tropics are lush and beautiful, with nice, sunny weather and gorgeous palm trees swaying to and fro.  The bad news is that all that nice weather helps breed pathogens and vectors thereof that are non-existent in the non-tropical latitudes of the developed world.  Yellow fever and malaria are two classic examples, but what has recently made news is the presence of the Zika virus in Brazil.  Did the IOC consider this when they awarded the Games to a country that is A) tropical, and B), still mostly Third World?

But that’s not the half of it.  Another hallmark of Third World countries is a much greater degree of pollution than in the developed world.  Outdoor aquatic venues for sailing and open water swimming are contaminated with trash and (drum roll, please) raw sewage.  Let that sink in for a moment or two.

Violence, of course, is another Third World problem (spare me the talk about developed world exceptions like Chicago and other inner cities where bad, warped values in those locales rule the day so as to provide Third World situations in an otherwise developed region).  A human foot and other body parts have recently washed up on a beach at Rio.  That’s bad enough.  Worse is that this particular beach is the same venue slated for beach volleyball events.  Speaking of violence, armed robberies on the street are up 24 percent.  Some athletes who have already shown up in preparation for the Olympics have sadly experienced this first-hand.  In May, an Olympic gold medalist from Spain and two other fellow member of their sailing team were robbed at gunpoint in Rio.  More recently, the same thing happened to two Australian paralympians.  Oh, and recently, a group of armed men stormed a hospital.

This rise in violence coincides at the same time with city police resources in Rio being strained to the breaking point.  They are so cash-poor that they have had to beg for basic office supplies and toilet paper.  Because of the lack of resources brought on by Brazil’s economic crisis, the police have had to ground their helicopters and have had to park half of their fleet of cars to save fuel.  Not what you want when hundreds of thousands of visitors, athletes and spectators alike, are about to count on police protection in that city.  Some policemen in Rio have threatened to shirk their duties on account of their paychecks being delayed as well.

The athletes themselves, many of whom have been gradually filing into the Olympic village in advance of the Games, have also borne the brunt of Rio’s many problems.  The village, which consists of 31 17-storey towers, has been plagued with leaky pipes, exposed wires, and blocked toilets.  Keep in mind that this is brand-new construction, not some dilapidated public housing tower.  Gotta love those Third World construction standards.  Already the Australian, Italian, and even Argentinian teams have rented hotels and/or apartments until the contractors can fix these issues.

Anybody with a healthy dose of common sense would quickly point out that when you give something as huge and important as the Olympic Games to a Third World country, even one as borderline and emerging as Brazil, that issues like these are par for the course.  So how did the IOC foolishly decide to let Rio de Janeiro host the Summer Games anyhow?

Three possible reasons:  One possibility is that the IOC is corrupt itself.  How else does one surmise that it gave the Winter Games to Sochi?  How else does one explain Russia not being entirely banned from these Olympics despite proven state-sanctioned doping at those Games?  Over the past decade, one thing I have learned is to never underestimate the IOC’s susceptibility to bribes.  The same thing could have happened in the Rio case.

A second reason is that political correctness clearly played a part in tainting the IOC’s collective judgment.  There is this politically correct mentality out there that every major city/major region deserves to host the Games.  Giving the Olympics to a South American country for the first time ever helped the IOC solidify their PC bona fides and thus they felt very good about themselves in the process for being so “inclusive”.

Third is that the International Olympic Committee was sold a bill of goods.  Brazil’s economy was on the rise in 2009.  Some observers at that time naively thought that Brazil’s economy would eventually surpass those of Britain and France.  The folks from the Rio organizing committee played on that, as well as the sexiness of the city, along with the beauty of the geographical surroundings.  Christine Brennan of USA Today, in an interview with Colin Cowherd on his FS1 radio and TV show The Herd, pointed out that this combination clearly played a factor when the IOC made their decision seven years ago.  All that was before Brazil’s Third World hang-ups helped cause its economy to crash and is now behind those of Italy and even India.

Solutions to avoiding issues like these in the future shall be explored in another article shortly come.  But for the time being, the economic crisis, the political crisis, the construction and infrastructural issues, the rampant pollution and the rising crime add up to a train wreck-in-the-making for these upcoming Olympic Games.  Maybe it will take such a disaster for the aristocratic-wannabes in Lausanne, Switzerland to finally wake up and use better judgment to avoid such disasters in the future.