Spotlight: Rio’s Olympic Win

It is time to light the Olympic Torch in a tropical country,” Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva told the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as it gathered in Copenhagen to select a site for the 2016 Summer Olympics. “It is Brazil’s time.” The IOC agreed. On Oct. 2, Rio de Janeiro beat out First World metropolises Madrid, Tokyo and Chicago to become the first South American city to host the Games–sparking a deafening celebration on Copacabana Beach to rival the city’s annual Carnaval bacchanal.

The IOC did more than signal its confidence that the birthplace of bossa nova can put on the world’s biggest sports spectacle. No country in Latin America–or anywhere else in the developing world–has hosted an Olympics since 1968, when Mexican soldiers massacred hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators just days before the opening of the Mexico City Games. By tapping Rio, the IOC affirmed the widely held opinion that Brazil–a democracy and the only nation among the world’s 10 largest economies never to have held an Olympics–is the first Latin country developed enough to give the region a second chance. “The IOC decision is an embrace of Brazil’s practical way of doing things,” says Paulo Sotero, director of the Brazil Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, referring to Lula’s unique hybrid of market economics and progressive social policy.

But Rio has a lot of work to do if it wants applause in 2016. True, athletes will compete in such iconic venues as the Maracanã soccer stadium–the largest in South America–while rowers and triathletes will ply Rio’s blue waters beneath the outstretched arms of the titanic Christ the Redeemer statue. But many of the venues for the 2016 Games–including the João Havelange Olympic Stadium, where track-and-field events will take place–don’t meet IOC standards or will require extensive renovations. Nearly 20 will need to be built from scratch. Cariocas, as Rio’s residents are called, are still reeling from the final bill for 2007’s much smaller Pan American Games, which ended up costing the city 10 times the original $177 million estimate. The 2016 Games’ $14 billion budget includes a $427 million Olympic Village for athletes, but lodging and security for everybody else are still question marks: Rio is short on hotel rooms, and the city’s homicide rate, 47 per 100,000 residents, not only is triple that of Olympic also-ran Chicago but is also up 10% this year.

Brazil will get a valuable practice run when it hosts the soccer World Cup in 2014; construction of venues for that event has yet to begin. Brazilians have long had to endure the joke that theirs was the country of the future and always would be. With that future just seven years away, they now have to prove they’ll be ready.