Last Sunday, the lower house of Brazil’s Congress voted to impeach the nation’s president, Dilma Rousseff, on charges of corruption. The senate has yet to confirm this impeachment, but just over four months before the opening ceremony of the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games it appears that the nation’s government is headed for turmoil.
Over the past few days, details have emerged that paint this scandal as deeply embedded within the fabric of the Brazilian political system. Though ostensibly related to price-fixing with the nation’s oil company, it has become increasingly clear that contracts related to the Olympic Games, from Rio’s harbor redevelopment area to its expanded metro system, have been handled in improperly. Many are now under investigation themselves.
This news is just the latest story in a long line of negative press surrounding recent Olympic events that have been placed in newly industrialized countries. The 2008 Beijing Games were nearly overshadowed by human-rights related protests that saw numerous attempts to extinguish the Olympic torch and plenty of media outcry. The 2014 Winter Games in Sochi were summed up by Gary Kasparov in a speech at Stanford as good for little more than “money laundering.” Between the Olympics and the World Cup, costs overruns and government scandals have seemingly rocked a global sporting event every couple years, and with the 2022 Olympics scheduled to return to Beijing and the next two World Cups already mired in scandal, it doesn’t appear that there is an end in sight.
It’s easy to see the International Olympic Committee’s rationale behind awarding the games to these potentially controversial cities. The organization has always stressed that the influx of development and tourism can leave a lasting legacy in a country, and in some cases, it has. The 1992 Olympics is often credited with igniting tourism in Barcelona, while the 2012 Olympics helped spread redevelopment dollars to a largely ignored area of London.
But even a Government 101 student should feel alarmed by the assumption that these gains achieved in relatively established democracies will apply across all nations. While an Olympics can bring cash and energy to projects that may have been difficult to take on otherwise, it cannot bring the strong national institutions necessary to execute them in an efficient manner. In China, these institutional deficiencies led to an endowment of stadiums that mostly sit empty and a lack of progress on even comparatively solvable issues like air pollution. In Rio, they have led to a theft from the Brazilian people.
Even in the best case scenario for the South American nation, it’s safe to say that the “legacy” aspects of the 2016 Games will be considerably smaller than originally anticipated. A core feature of Rio’s Olympic plan was that the city would boost its water treatment to help turn its unsanitary harbors into a world-class sailing venue; now, it’s uncertain whether the city will even be able to divert this sewage in time. The supposedly lasting improvements to security and policing in the city that were supposed to accompany the Games have reportedly been scaled back in favor of a scheme that effectively consists of the army occupying parts of the town for the duration of the games.
The best argument in defense of the IOC throughout these competitions may be that the costs, as headline-grabbing as they may have been, have not actually been that large in real terms. While few recent hosts have reaped immense benefits from the Games, most have limped along after them at more or less the pace they did before. Even the 2004 Athens Games, probably the closest thing to an exception to this rule, realistically only accelerated an economic disaster that was almost certain to happen at some point anyway; the billions of dollars invested in the Olympics were outpaced by a broken pension system and an irresponsible economic culture.
In Brazil, however, this track record of “acceptable” damage looks perilously close to turning even farther south. The economic improvements are already looking like a lost cause; more and more, it looks like Brazil’s semblance of democracy might follow suit. Brazil is going through a formative national test at a time when its international commitments dictate that it absolutely cannot. It’s hard to predict the long-term implications of this, but they might not be pretty.
Whatever ends up happening in the coming months, the Games themselves probably won’t end in total disaster. There’s something very powerful about the imagery of every nation coming together to compete, and the continuous TV broadcast of this tranquil setting is likely to ease our concerns about the impact of the Games on the host nation.
Still, it’s important to see the big picture of the Olympics and, for once, make enough noise to ensure the lessons we learn are heeded the next time the Games’ location is decided. The Olympics are still one of the world’s finest sporting events. But let’s not delude ourselves into thinking that they can be anything more.
Console resident sailing expert Andrew Mather about the state of Rio’s harbors at amather ‘at’ stanford.edu.