It’s no use complaining to the International Olympic Committee, since it’s playing the role of Daddy in this family drama. He also disapproves of everything we do: He complained about construction delays, criticized the pollution in Rio’s waterways and said we were even worse than Greece, before the 2004 Summer Olympics. “Your older sister had better grades,” we heard him say.

It’s as if they were both expecting a classical pianist and all they got was a punk rocker who knows only three-chord songs. Well, if they wanted punctuality, maybe they should have chosen the Germans or the Swiss to host their events. We Brazilians are slightly different.

Last month, Mário Gobbi, the president of the Corinthians soccer team (which owns Itaquera Stadium, one of the World Cup venues), claimed that delays were part of the Brazilian way of life. “I don’t know of any renovation or construction project that went on schedule,” he said in an interview.

I’ll give one example: The subway system in Salvador, a city in Bahia state, on our northeast coast, has been under construction since 1997. The government has spent more than $450 million for four miles of tracks, which will be ready to operate on June 11, one day before the World Cup opening. (Two years ago, the Federal Court of Auditors found evidence that $180 million of the project’s money had been lost to overbilling and embezzlement, but the matter is still under investigation. Bahia’s Court of Justice has also indicted a number of businessmen for illicit association, formation of cartels and bid rigging.)

Another: 22 years ago I worked on a petition to clean up the Tietê River, in São Paulo. Today, $1.6 billion and more than one million signatures later, it still stinks.

In Brazil it takes 13 bureaucratic procedures — required signatures and forms and the like — and 107.5 working days to open a business, according to a recent report from the World Bank. Construction permits take 400 days to get issued, and you need to wait 58 days more just to get electricity flowing.

It once took a man in Bahia four years to schedule a common diagnostic test called a uroflowmetry at a public hospital.