For all the iniquities involved in staging the Olympics, the Games are still a chance to lay bare untended issues in our societies. PHOTOGRAPH BY DADO GALDIERI / BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY

For many countries, the prospect of hosting the Summer Olympics is sought after as the maximum consecration of their place as a modern power. In the past century, this was notoriously evident at the Berlin Olympics, of 1936, which Adolf Hitler hoped to use to show off the Olympian superiority of his master race. Eight years ago, the Beijing Olympics, with their showy inaugural ceremony and no-expenses-spared sports venues, were China’s statement about its place on the world scene. When Brazil was selected as the host of this Olympiad, seven years ago, it seemed fitting that the great South American nation—much admired for many things, including its people's renowned charisma—should have the honor of hosting the 2016 Games.

Over the course of the previous decade, the Brazilian behemoth had finally awoken from its provincial slumbers to become an international economic powerhouse, emerging as the “B” in the vaunted BRIC group of nations. (The others are Russia, India, and China.) This rise was presided over by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—known as Lula, a President with a rock-star popularity, whose social and economic policies had lifted thirty million Brazilians out of extreme poverty and brought twenty million more into the middle class. Brazil had also begun to exercise a commensurate measure of influence on the global political scene, with Lula dispensing advice and bear hugs to a range of foreign leaders who included Barack Obama and Hugo Chávez. Brazil had arrived; what better way for everyone to celebrate than with the Olympics?

At the same time, for all of its social and economic advances, Brazil remained a country of abysmal inequalities, chronic injustice, and high levels of violent crime. But in the same way that Lula, a former metalworker and unionist with only a few years of formal education, had overcome the limitations of his origins to become his country’s President, there was a belief that Brazil could improve on its successes and be ready for the honor that it had been awarded. It had, moreover, seven years to do so and, with one of the ten biggest economies in the world, the resources to pay for the Games, too.

That was back in 2009. A lot has changed in Brazil since then. Over the past year and a half, the country’s economy has taken a nosedive, with corruption scandals and rising unemployment and inflation leading to widespread discontent. Brazil is a BRIC country that failed, and it is now mired in a humiliating political drama that saw the ouster, in May, of Lula’s leftist successor, President Dilma Rousseff. A right-wing-dominated Senate voted to impeach her, not for corruption but for ostensibly doctoring government budget figures. (Many of the politicians who worked to remove her have been charged with or accused of a range of crimes, including corruption, but are protected from criminal proceedings by their jobs.) In a sideshow to the Olympics, Rousseff’s Senate impeachment trial will likely begin next week.

As the Games have approached, Brazil’s deficiencies in preparedness for them have become painfully evident, and include everything from shoddy workmanship in sports facilities and the athletes’ village to the untreated sewage, and occasional floating bodies, in Guanabara Bay, where the water-sports events are to take place—not to mention the presence of violent armed gangs, and so on. The many protesters and policemen who have thronged Rio this week attest to the country’s untended issues. There is also the spectre of the Zika virus, which has been especially virulent in Brazil, and fears of an ISIS-inspired terrorist attack, along with a litany of other potential threats.

There have been gratuitous headlines and media hype about all of this, but there is, more broadly, a growing unseemliness about many of the great international sporting events. In every one of these Games, whether Summer or Winter, it has become almost an assumption that financiers and developers with connections to those in power win sweetheart bids to build the inevitable galaxy of new roads, airport terminals, commuter-train lines, stadiums, and sports villages deemed necessary for the great event. Vladimir Putin’s fifty-two billion dollars spent on the 2014 Winter Games, in Sochi, are a case in point. It’s also true that the winning bids sometimes appear to have less to do with best-man fair play and more with the greasing of palms. (FIFA’s selection of Russia and Qatar to host the next two World Cups has merely compounded that perception.)

Unfortunately, these Games also bear a taint of corruption because of the decision by the International Olympic Committee to allow most Russian athletes to compete in spite of evidence of a massive state-sponsored doping program and a call by the independent World Anti-Doping Agency to ban all Russian athletes from the Rio Olympics. The I.O.C. instead named a three-member panel to determine which athletes could attend: a hundred and eighteen Russian athletes have been banned, while another two hundred and seventy-one have been cleared to participate.

Still, there are the uplifting stories that attest to the triumph of the human spirit—the female Syrian-refugee swimmer who is competing in Rio; the Afghans and South Sudanese who have made it despite their countries’ conflicts; and even, perhaps, the hopeful sign embodied by the presence of two female Saudi runners.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the Olympics as a proving ground for national pride. The Tokyo Olympics, in 1964, only nineteen years after the end of the Second World War, were supposed to show that at least some of the ghosts of that time had been overcome, and the country’s new face. Or witness the self-deprecating Brits, still red-cheeked in self-congratulation after their wildly successful 2012 London Olympics. It has become rare to see it done so well. (And, in light of the recent Brexit vote, it’s a reminder that no nation is ever monolithic in its virtues, or its sins, either.) In a sense, the Games are something like the United Nations: a useful venue for bouts of multilateral togetherness. Such efforts are costly, even wasteful, and seem rarely to achieve very much, but when they do, it is close to sublime.

And herein, perhaps, lies the promising paradox: for all the iniquities entailed in bringing them about, the Olympics are still a chance to lay bare and highlight those other, untended issues in our societies. The Brazil Olympiad is the sum total of all of the things that we love, and also abhor, about the Games and the country, a most beloved place and, also, a most unequal one. For the sake of ordinary Brazilians, and of all of the athletes participating, let’s hope that the Rio Games, as a sporting event, are a world-class triumph. May they also, somehow, represent a defeat for the corrupt politicians, developers, and assorted buccaneers who have made the Games, and Brazil, their particular feeding ground.