The World Cup and Olympics threaten to overwhelm Rio – yet there is time to create a sensation out of disaster
Rio
de Janeiro is now desperately behind schedule for the 2016 Olympic
Games. Sport's mega-events should not be allowed to traumatise this
magnificent, complex city
Rio de Janeiro's Christ the Redeemer statue
towers above the Maracana stadium, a venue for the 2014 World Cup and
2016 Olympics. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
Has
Rio de Janeiro the guts? The city is now desperately behind schedule
for its 2016 Olympics – one insider put it at 10% ready, where London
was 60% ready at the same stage. But a visit earlier this month left me
with an intriguing question. Could Rio’s chaotic planners make
virtue of necessity? Could they be the first city to haul the
Olympics back from its fixation with money and buildings, and restore
them to sport? Could Rio fashion a sensation from a disaster?
The
main Olympic park at Barra da Tijuca was until recently strike-bound.
The secondary one at Deodoro is a military base and not even started.
This month, the International Olympic Committee in Turkey declared “a
critical situation” and demanded the Brazilian government do
something. It set up a committee. The IOC spokesman, Mark Adams, had
to deny rumours of plan B, to move the games from Rio altogether, but
significantly failed to rule this out, merely saying “at this stage
that would be far too premature”.
No
one visiting Rio at present can imagine cancellation as anything but
devastating. In this fantasy world of prestige, multibillion dollar
budgets and white elephants, even a shambles is thought better than
cancellation. But the city could yet seize the initiative. With
domestic elections in October and the games faced with plummeting
domestic support, Brazil’s politicians could plead force majeur,
call the IOC’s bluff and stage a slimmed down “austerity”
games, as did Britain in 1948.
They
could abandon the unbuilt cluster at Deodoro, intended for events
such as rugby, kayaking and mountain biking. They could cancel some
of the IOC’s “toff” sports such as tennis, golf, sailing and
equestrianism, as well as the absurdity of staging a second soccer
competition just two years after this year’s World Cup. They could
slash arena and stadium capacity to what it can already offer, and
tell thousands of gilded IOC officials, sponsors and VIPs there will
be no luxury apartments, limousines and private traffic lanes, just
camping on Copacabana beach.
The
catalyst might well be this June’s Olympics-lite, otherwise known
as the football World Cup. It is costing Brazil $4bn (£2.4bn) on stadiums alone for 64 football matches – a staggering $62m per match – plus some $7bn for associated infrastructure. Only generals at war and Swiss sports officials contemplate
such obscene spending. When Fifa’s secretary-general,
Jerome Valcke, came to inspect preparations last month, he professed
himself appalled. Two years ago he had warned Brazil to give itself
“a kick up the backside”. His boss Sepp Blatter said the place
was “the most delayed World Cup since I have been at Fifa.” They
treated Brazil as a badly behaved child.
The main Olympic park at Barra da Tijuca
(above) has been hit by strikes. The secondary one at Deodoro has not
been started. Photograph: AFP/Getty
In
truth Fifa was a fool. It had staged the 2010 World Cup in South
Africa by the skin of its teeth, the country recouping a mere 10% of its $3bn outlay. Studies of such
mega-events, financed by their sponsors, invariably estimate huge
profits, later declaring little more than “goodwill and
reputational gain”. Brazil’s World Cup spending was wild from the
start. Domestic politics made it increase Fifa’s requirement of
eight venues to 12, including new stadiums in Manaus and Brasilia
that are not needed locally and may never see more than four football
matches.
In
June last year, the unheard-of occurred, with urban riots nationwide
against even hosting the cup. Public support fell from 80%
when the cup was “awarded” to Brazil in 2007 to under 50% now. At the last count, 55% of Brazilians
think the cup will harm their economy rather than benefit it. While
urban bus fares were being raised, millions of dollars were vanishing
into corrupt building contracts. Demonstrators shouting “There will
be no World Cup” fought police. The protests continued sporadically
and last month the army had to invade some of Rio’s favelas to
restore some semblance of control ahead of the June deadline.
More
worrying for Rio is the political backwash from the World Cup on to
the Olympics. At present the talk is that if Brazil wins the cup (it
is sixth in the Fifa rankings), the public may just tolerate the
Olympics, but if not, “the games are dead”. As the city’s
famously short-fused mayor Eduardo Paes recently told the press: “Don’t
ever in your life do a World Cup and an Olympic Games at
the same time … I am not cut out to be a masochist.”
These
mega-events traumatise a complex modern city. They upset the rhythms
of its politics and infrastructure investment. They clear thousands
from their homes and virtually close down whole cities for a month.
IOC plutocrats arrive like visiting princelings long accustomed to
living at the expense of others. In London they demanded and got
exclusive limousine lanes (including outside Harrods) and traffic
lights switched to green as they drove to their venues. They
block-booked luxury hotels and dumped unwanted rooms onto the market
when it was too late for re-letting. Their sponsors demanded the
removal of rival advertisements anywhere near the venues (even on
toilet equipment). They expected some 40,000 security staff to be on
hand, or four times the number of athletes, to protect “the Olympic
family”.
Even
after shaking off past corruption scandals, the IOC is addicted to
extravagance. The games nowadays float on national hyperbole and
civic rivalry, festivals not of sport but of competitive
mega-structures. The IOC requires each venue to meet meticulous
specifications at whatever cost. The number of sports increases each
time (currently 26 covering some 400 events), all craving their hour
in the television spotlight.
Pele (right) and Brazil's president at the
time, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (left), celebrate the decision to host
the Games in Rio. Photograph: Reuters
Some 95% of the budget of a modern Olympics goes not on sport but on
steel, concrete, bricks and mortar, even in cities such as London with
perfectly adequate facilities already. “Starchitects” propose ever
wilder arenas that everyone knows will come in at double or treble their
estimates. They absorb labour, energy, materials, land and effort which
are then not available for urban investment elsewhere. The global scale
of such evanescent spending over the decades must be staggering.
Under
the IOC’s new president, Thomas Bach, there have been some signs of
concern, if not of remorse, at this extravagance. Bach has declared his
commitment to “sustainable development”, whatever that means. This has
mostly taken the form of preferring rich hosts and stable governments
able to deliver soaring budgets without significant protest from local
people, such as Beijing and Sochi (and indeed London).
In
these terms Brazil was always a gamble. Earlier this month one of
London’s Olympic organisers, Lord Dyson, visited Rio to brief its
team on “lessons from London”. He brought two messages, the need
for “total engagement” in the games of the whole host nation and
the need for a palpable legacy. It was good advice. Rio’s vanity is
much resented elsewhere in Brazil, and a host city in crisis will
need its nation on board. Rio has taken one bit of advice from London
and hired the American project contractor, Aecom, to “deliver”
the games.
Meanwhile
legacy has become a ruling obsession of Olympics public relations. As
one Rio official put it: “Without legacy, there is no way so much
money can justifiably be spent on a fortnight of sport.” But what
is legacy? All that is certain is that the sums spent on construction
are gargantuan. The Brazil World Cup was originally bid at a cost of
$1bn for new stadiums and upgrades. This swiftly rose with associated
infrastructure to over $8bn, with only the vaguest concept of audit.
When
Rio won the games in 2009, to ecstatic scenes on Copacabana beach,
the talk was of holding down costs by re-using facilities built for
the Pan-American games of 2007. The latest official count has this
cost at $15bn, more than London. But estimates
of committed “Olympics-related legacy” stretch as high as $90bn
over the current decade. This must imply a severe distortion of
Brazil’s normal infrastructure planning.
Guanabara Bay – Rio's Olympic sailing venue – has been promised a cleanup. Photograph: Sergio Moraes/Reuters
On
the Games themselves, 52 projects were to be located in four hubs.
“Nomadic architecture” would be employed, whereby stadiums could
be dismantled and rebuilt as schools. In addition there was a new
“Transcarioca” urban highway with rapid transit bus track, two
other lines, 57 new hotels and the renewal of the semi-derelict port
area of the city. The city’s Guanabara Bay would be relieved of its
flotsam and of the pollution pouring into it from surrounding favelas
– essential for the sailing events.
Most
exciting of all was the first coherent plan for investment in favela
“urbanisation”, the so-called Morar Carioca. Fashioned in
partnership with the Institute of Brazilian Architects, it committed
$4.5bn to “infrastructure, landscaping, leisure and living …
generating comfort and dignity for more than 200,000 people”. This
was to run in parallel with the favela “pacification” programme
instituted by the state governor, Sergio Cabral, and his police chief,
Jose Beltramine. Begun in 2008, this determined to liberate the fifth
of the city’s inhabitants living in mostly hillside districts
outside the rule of law, rife with anarchy, drug-dealing, violence
and few utilities of public services. The plan would be true legacy,
one of the most imaginative urban renewal projects I have seen
anywhere.
The
legacy of the legacy has been bitter disappointment. The cross-town
highway has been built and the port area is being revived. But the
bay remains polluted. There have been battles over favela clearances
to make way for games sites, notably at Vila Autodromo next to the
main Olympic park. Activists from the “Popular Committee for the
World Cup and Olympics” claim more than 170,000 people are being driven
from their homes for games-related purposes. Rio may not match
Beijing’s record for Olympic eviction, when a reported 1.5 million people
were cleared for 2008, but it is rising fast.
Even in the favelas, Brazilians supposedly enjoy a right to
consultation before compulsory removal and to being rehoused near their
existing homes – chief reason for the rarity of slum clearance. But the
popular committee’s Renato Consentino says: “When your home is impeding
the Olympics, everything is short-circuited.” Some eviction notices even
carry the Olympic logo, hardly enhancing the games’ popularity. After
such elevated expectations, to be hit by two mega-events in succession,
says Consentino, “has emptied out any time for democracy”.
Military police on horseback patrol during a
'pacification' operation in the favela of Lins de Vasconcelos.
Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images
Brazilians
are habitual sceptics of what their rulers say to them. Theirs is not
the instinctive deference to government of Russians, Chinese or even
Britons. The promises of power mean little since they are so rarely
kept. In Rio, the tide of opinion appears at last to be turning. For
Fifa’s World Cup, celebrity “ambassadors” were chosen from the
nation’s soccer stars, such as Pele and Ronaldo. Both have been
ridiculed by street protesters as “enemies of the people”.
Meanwhile their former colleague, Romario, footballer turned
politician, has taken to the airwaves and is running for the senate,
hurling abuse at Fifa’s extravagance and deriding Blatter and
Valcke as “thieves and sons of bitches” (and worse). He asks how
they can demand that Brazil pay for “first-world stadiums when we
cannot afford first-world hospitals and schools”.
Saddest
of all has been the virtual abandonment of Morar Carioca. While the
pacification programme has been moderately successful, with roughly
half the favelas “retaken” by the police from gangsters, there
has been little or no follow-up with sewers, water supply, streets
and social infrastructure. By the end of last year, the Catalytic
Communities website recorded that of the 219 favelas initially
designated, “upgrades have begun in none”.
At
the Institute of Brazilian Architects, its president Sergio Magalhaes
shuffles gloomily over the plans and drawings of what had been
proposed for his city and is now in abeyance. He sees the
backtracking as “recklessly adding to a general sense of
dissatisfaction” with mega-events as a whole. Infrastructure
projects such as the urban highway merely “link rich area to rich
area”. An interview with him in the Brazilian magazine Veja is
headlined simply, “The architects are furious.”
Any
visitor to Rio is left puzzled at the naivety with which it ever
believed the IOC’s hyperbole. There is no Midas touch to grand
sporting occasions, just cost. An extravagant opening and closing
ceremony, some gold medals for the hosts and good public relations
can generate a passing feel-good effect, as they did in Barcelona and
London. Even when the cost is crippling, as with Athens, the IOC’s
salesmen declared a “return in glory, reputation and future
tourism”.
Serious
economists despair of these events. The founder of the modern
Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin, saw them as forging peace between
peoples. With the Berlin Games of 1936 they became more a festival of chauvinism,
a beauty contest between nations and ideologies, reaching a sort of
nadir at the Sochi Winter Olympics. A report by Bloomberg
suggests the chief gain is not in peace but in construction company
share prices. A study by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski predicts
that this year’s World Cup will see “a transfer of wealth from
Brazil as a whole to various interest groups”, mostly soccer clubs
and private corporations. It will “not be an economic bonanza”.
The
much-vaunted extra tourism is an Olympic chimera. Sydney in 2000 was
told it would see a boom in visits and when this failed it ran angry
advertisements with the slogan, “So where the bloody hell are you?”
Athens and Beijing were half-deserted for the Olympics, and South
Africa’s World Cup saw barely two-thirds of the predicted visitors.
British tourism was blitzed by the 2012 Olympics and is still 3% down on 2011.
Boys play football in the Borel favela –
previously controlled by drug traffickers but now occupied by the city's
Police Pacification Unit. Photograph: Buda Mendes/Getty
The
nearest parallel to the Olympics nowadays is probably a war, an
outburst of patriotic fervour, fathered by mild mendacity out of
public expenditure. Criticism is suppressed. Medals tables are listed
like battle honours. Home contestants are “heroes”. Winners are
showered with state baubles and losers stripped of grants.
Some
of Rio’s more cynical citizens even give this parallel a sort of
welcome. They hope the Olympics might discipline a lethargic city
bureaucracy, defeating the nay-sayers as deadlines fall due and
yielding at least some projects of lasting usefulness. They are
pleased that Rio is now the focus of world attention, with resulting
self-criticism. The favelas are crawling with academics and camera
crews as never before, as if waiting for them to explode for the
World Cup and the Games.
This
could suggest a new phenomenon, the mega-event as the critical mover
in cities where the politics of urban renewal has seized up. Whether
such a trauma is the best way of ordering any society is another
matter. Any city that can blow billions of dollars on a fortnight’s
party and not repair public services such as Rio’s has its
governance seriously awry.
Even
before the party has begun, much of Rio seems to be suffering from a
hangover. The mayor is talking masochism and there are plenty of
others, including within the IOC, wondering if it is too late to
stop. The planning professor at Rio University, Orlando dos Santos
Junior, sees dire conflict ahead in the clash between spending on
white elephants and crying needs elsewhere in the city – producing
what he calls “an agony of disappointed loyalties”.
I
believe Rio still has time to show the courage London lacked in 2005.
London boasted it would stage “a People’s Games”, a low-cost
festival of urban fun. But it capitulated to the IOC’s grandiosity,
building a new stadium rather than using Wembley and raising a $4bn
budget to $13bn.
Rio
could do the precise opposite. It could welcome the world to whatever
stadiums and arenas are left from the 2007 Pan-American games, and rely on
television to reach audiences. It could tailor the Olympics to Rio
rather than Rio to the Olympics. The city of carnival would offer a
carnival of sport, proving that poor cities as well as rich ones can
sometimes stage these mega-events. Do that and instead of being
abused for delay and incompetence, this magnificent city would have
the world cheering its daring and its guts. Go for it, Rio.
• Medellín: from murder capital to model city?
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário