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.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest 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.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest 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.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest 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 security secretary, José Beltrame. 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”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest 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.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest 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 the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, 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?

• This article was amended on Thursday 24 April 2014 to correct the name of state security secretary José Beltrame

