In terms of individual disasters, Rio is giving the worst Olympics run for money: David Goldblatt

Renowned sports writer and sociologist David Goldblatt has published highly acclaimed books on football: The Ball is Round, an astonishingly ambitious global history of the game, Futebol Nation, a footballing history of Brazil, and The Game of Our Lives, about the meaning and making of English football. Goldblatt has taught the sociology of sport at Bristol University, De Montfort University, Leicester, and Pitzer College, Los Angeles.

He recently delivered the book The Games: A Global History of the Olympics, a highly insightful, enjoyable and anecdotal account of Olympic history in its many facets. Scroll.in spoke to Goldblatt about the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.

Have the Olympic Games in Rio seen their worst preparation ever?

Well, that was the claim from Mr [John] Coates, an Australian on the International Olympic Committee, back in 2014, when taking a look at things just before the World Cup. In terms of individual disasters or individual problems, other Olympics may have been worse, but, across the board, Rio is giving them all a run for their money.

Athens was late with more white elephants, but Rio has only just managed to open its metro. They have cut things extraordinarily fine. Rio hasn’t built as many mad stadia as Athens – there are more pop-ups and simple, functional architecture, but the infrastructure that has been built, is invariably for the benefit of the wealthy. Is it the most corrupt? Probably. Sochi had probably more money taken off it as part of the Russian system, but as the Car Wash investigation [Lavo Jato] and the exposure of a gigantic network of corruption and kickbacks in the Brazilian infrastructure industry – and in relationship with politicians – showed, Rio is, again, up there.

Rio has seen forced evictions and relocations, invariably on inequitably terms between real estate developers and local residents. Seoul and Beijing moved more people. I suspect Atlanta was more ruthless with its social cleansing of the homeless, but Rio is doing all of it. What distinguishes Rio is that no one has had to do it at a time of severe economic downturn and fiscal chaos. Los Angeles in 1932 was held in the teeth of the depression, but California was barely touched by comparison to the rest of the United States. Brazil’s decline is actually worse and [so is] the state of the public finances, which in 1932 was barely significant, because it wasn’t funded by the public finance. It has all come in the wake of a constitutional crisis. A combination of the worst circumstances and across the board disastrous preparations probably puts Rio up there.

Is Rio in danger of becoming the new Athens 2004, which was a financial disaster? Rio’s mayor Eduardo Paes has highlighted in the past that Rio can’t afford the Olympic Games.

Might it? The State of Rio de Janeiro is bankrupt. They were in trouble anyway and the Olympics have contributed to that. With Athens, again, although it ended up costing €16 billion, the Greek public sector debt – let alone what was owned in the banking system – was €310 billion. That €16 billion was not insignificant, but Greece was going down. It made its contribution, but you can’t overstate its macro-fiscal impact. Remember, Greece is a country of 10 million people, Brazil has over 200 million.

It was going to be bad in Rio anyway. The squandered opportunities are the worst. Rio required a serious program of spending on general infrastructure and, indeed, on sporting infrastructure, not to mention housing, sewing and transport. It’s just tragic that the money has been spent in the way it has, and so much time and energy has been diverted and consumed by the Olympics: Money that desperately needed to go elsewhere. The costs are not just in the money spent, but the fact of everyone thinking about what to do in the last six years.

In contrast, Barcelona '92 was kaleidoscopic. It is always hailed as the model for any host of Olympic Games, or even major sports events. Why?

First and foremost, they looked fantastic on television in a way that no other Olympics has done. It got an extraordinary global response. In the aftermath of the Olympics, Barcelona went from a backward rustbelt Mediterranean port, that had had barely any notice on it since the Civil War, to, suddenly, one of the most desirable tourist and conference locations in the world, to the point today, where the debate in Barcelona is how can we tone down the tourist influx and diversify in other areas?

Too many tourists have their consequences. The problem with Barcelona wasn’t that it was a success, but shallow conclusions were drawn from it. Barcelona was almost two decades in the making, whereas the discourse today is about the Olympics as a catalyst for urban redevelopment and regeneration. Barcelona’s Olympics were the crowning glory of 17 years of very carefully, prepared, systematic and sophisticated urban planning and urban politics.

Barcelona wouldn’t have looked half so good and worked half so well if nearly €10 billion hadn’t been spent on the infrastructure and regeneration of the city beyond the Olympics. The program of street beautification and transformation was really integral to making Barcelona look and feel so great in 1992. Another thing about Barcelona is that not many cities in the world can say – “Oh, we have got the Sagrada Familia and the legacy of Gaudi, Miro and Picasso, and Montjuïc, and a Mediterranean coastline, and weather,” all of which were integral to the success. Barcelona was a success, but it hasn’t been repeatable since. Few cities can [repeat it]. I don’t think we will have another Barcelona until we have an Olympic hosting program, which asks bidders to engage in a process of 15 years rather than the current ludicrous time table of seven years.

Urban development and a unique set of circumstances are prerequisites for hosting successful Olympic Games. Why indeed have other cities not been able to replicate this? Rio is the gateway to Brazil and is the country’s advertorial with plenty of stereotypes. When they were awarded the Olympic Games, what could have been their strengths and how could the city have exploited them?

What mayors around the world loved about Barcelona was being off the global map and then getting on it. London and Beijing is not the agenda. Nobody needed to be reminded of their existence. I would have never given the Olympics to Rio, because the proposal was obviously one that would produce socially inequitable urban development.

Placing the weight of the Olympics in Barra da Tijuca, the large Western suburb, a vast motorway access a gated community for wealthy Cariocas who want to get out of the city. You knew at that point: this is not going to work as a socially equitable program. The vast majority of the infrastructure money is about ferrying rich people around. The metro that has opened – and, my god, Rio desperately needs more metros, having travelled there myself – goes from Leblon where rich people live to Barra da Tijuca where rich people live. The Zona Norte, where most Cariocas live, is screaming for new transport infrastructure. [There], people are spending a third of their income and a quarter of their lives on a bus to get to work. As in some real big Indian cities, nothing has been spent there.

The one thing one hoped for – though I never believed in it – was that they would sort the sewage system out – at least, improve it. It’s a big and complicated task to sort Rio’s sewage system out after more than a hundred years of neglect. You can see from the quality of the waters that the Olympians are going to be competing in and which the rest of Rio has to live with every day of their lives that it’s a complete and utter failure. Could the Olympics have been a catalyst to a better kind of development in Rio? Yes, it could have been but under the kind of prevailing political climate and with the plan that was out there in 2009 this was inevitable really.

So, part of the solution in the future would be to extend the Olympic planning timeline from seven years to 15 years, or even 20 years?

Well, let’s start with 15 years. You need to deal with the problems of gigantism, etc. There needs to be a reform of host bidding: people need to come to the table with a completely different calibre and quality of plan, a demonstrable commitment to urban planning, social development and to high levels of participation in grassroots sport. You should not even be allowed to bid until you can do that. Then you can be in the bidding process and have a bit of the cultural infrastructure to leave a legacy and make use of the Olympics.

Why does it just have to be in one city? It isn’t in one city anyway most of the time. Beijing is going to host the Winter Olympics. The mountains are a hundred and eighty miles away! The sailing in Beijing [2008] was about 900 miles away. So why not have multiple cities, not necessarily even in the same country? Spread costs and penalise people who want to spend a lot of money. But this comes back to the problem of the IOC, a small group of people, a collection of royal houses, ex-Olympians, the great and the good and the rich, who obviously do not know a thing about urban development and infrastructure building. Is this a sensible group of people to make these kinds of judgements? [Awarding the Olympics to] Rio has demonstrated their incapacity to do so. The IOC needs reform. It is a big program of reform if you can imagine the Olympics delivering on the urbanist promises that have been claimed for it, but I am pretty sceptical.

Do you imply that the IOC created this crisis?

Oh no, no. I mean, the IOC bears some of the responsibility over the last 30 years. Obviously the mad expansion of the Olympics goes on under their watch. It’s a combination of forces and factors. You can, above all, put it down to the bidders, because the IOC bears responsibility for ludicrously high level of demands, corruption, terrible judgement, etc. They have actively colluded with the people who run the Olympics from the peak of national governments to local mayors and networks of infrastructure firms, etc. The combination is different in different Olympics, but they all bear the responsibility.

With few cities willing to bid, is the IOC in an existential crisis or is this just a temporary phase? After Barcelona '92, there was a surge in bidders that, however, can’t always be the case.

We are not quite at the existential crisis yet. The 2022 Winter Olympic Games came down to two bidders and that was genuinely worrying for the IOC, particularly because Oslo, Stockholm and St Moritz all pulled out after a combination of public pressure and government concerns. That left the IOC with just Almaty, in Kazakhstan, and Beijing, in China, obviously a long way away from the mountains. The bidding for the 2024 Summer Olympic Games has been conducted under Agenda 2020, which are the reforms that [Thomas] Bach proposed and then introduced in 2014, most of which was about trying to make the bidding process more flexible, more of a dialogue between the cities and the IOC rather than the McDonald’s franchise model.

What have we got? We are down to four, which seems like “They are back, they may have turned a corner.” But Rome is about to withdraw, because the new mayor is from the Five Star Movement and is against the Olympics. Budapest doesn’t look terribly serious. So we are down to Los Angeles and Paris. There are very few cities that can do what both Los Angeles and Paris can. Los Angeles can go "University of California Los Angeles, you are the Olympic pitch" and it is sort of done. The next 10 years will really tell and we will see what happens at Rio – how much of an advert is the Rio experience to prospective Olympic bidders? I wonder.

In a way, Rio has also been part of the solution, as in football – going south and to new territories. Can this last?

It depends on whether we have another commodity boom. It’s really important and good that the world’s mega-events have gone to the global south. The Olympics and the World Cup purport to be cosmopolitan, universal, human festivals. Then, you need to represent the vast bulk of humanity if you are serious. Europe, North America, and East Asia to an extent, have held the whip hand.

You have to live with the world, the IOC and FIFA – basically, not everyone can be Denmark. It’s okay if it’s not a democracy or a complex regime. On the one hand, it’s been good; on the other hand, it has come with enormous problems in different places. The positive impact has almost been zero for the host cities and host nations. That’s not how one wants it to be. Can it last?

Well, at the moment, East Asia is carrying the can of the Olympics – China, South Korea and Japan will host the next three. After that, one wonders – what state will the world economy be in? How many bidders will there be? Under the current regime, it’s very hard to see any African city hosting an Olympics. But why not hold the Olympics all across Africa? How flexible and intelligent are the international sporting movements? Can something more appealing, more just and more socially equitable devised? If not, I don’t suppose it will be going to Africa.

When do you think India will host an Olympics or a World Cup?

That’s a great question! India may host a World Cup first. The Commonwealth Games demonstrated that a) it can be done, but b) what an awful lot of problems beforehand, during, and after, have come with it. India is not alone in that and it added its own particular overt taste and manic twist to it. At this stage, India is quite a long way from hosting a World Cup until football takes off, but as I watch what happens with the Indian Premier League and the enormous growth of interest in the big cities for world football as well as local football and you look at FIFA’s record of taking World Cups to new football territories, there is more chance of the World Cup coming to India, say by 2050, than there is of the Olympics.

Let me revert back to Agenda 2020, which was launched to abide a sense of crisis and to make the bidding process more flexible, but in awarding the Winter Olympics to Beijing 2022, it does feel more like window-dressing?

The 2022 Winter Olympics were awarded under the old order, rather than the Agenda 2020 model. Human rights and reputational damage aside, it wasn’t an entirely bad idea to award it to Beijing. Kazakhstan had some mad infrastructure built over the last 10 years, more was coming. Agenda 2020 is way, way too cautious and it’s still operating with all the assumptions of the old world order of how these things should be. It hasn’t gotten to the root of the problem or created new systems and devices to encourage better development. It is slightly window-dressing as long as you don’t change the makeup of the IOC, rewrite the Olympic Charter and the IOC’s appraisal of the consequences of its own decisions over the last thirty years doesn’t become honest.

Still, the Olympic Games – somewhere between “an extravaganza anywhere” or “a theme park without a theme” – always draw in big television audiences from around the world, why do the Olympic Games have an enduring attraction?

It makes for sensational television: high performance, competitive sports in fabulously, constructed stadia in multimedia form generates amazing beauty, very compelling stories and taps in to profound senses of nationalism. For all its cosmopolitan core, that’s very important for the Olympics: it’s the teary moment while the national anthem plays and the gold medal is awarded, that is pulling in ratings.

High-level sport is an incredible form of cultural performance and interaction. It’s truly universal and graspable by the entire planet because it’s non-linguistic. The human narratives are amazing. I have been very negative, but that’s because this is so important, this really matters. The IOC and the global sports organisations need to be brought to account. They need to live up to the claims they make. For the last 100 years, they haven’t and it is time that they did.

Why is sports so important? You imply that sport is about selling emotion – that also highlights the shift from sports as an athletic and moral ideal to a consumerist and commercialist good? The athletic and moral idea are no longer there.

That’s the question: are they no longer there? The point that they are no longer there and that they have been entirely consumed by the forces of economics and politics, then we have reached ground zero, haven’t we? Then it no longer matters.

That’s true of all commercial and professional sports, that it walks the line. Someone has to pay for the spectacular, the festival and the circus, someone has to organise. Does that then destroy everything? That’s true for a lot of political and cultural life generally. We are fighting it. Is there much left? Yes. The IOC and the organisers are doing their very best to eradicate that. There will be refugee athletes, under the Olympic flag, and Usain Bolt – fingers crossed, doing something unbelievably unprecedented and extraordinary. These are slithers. The 2022 World Cup in Qatar is the point where I go, “Actually, this is not redeemable.”

I am not prepared to watch a World Cup built in cathedrals by slave labour in effect, with that much blood on people’s hands. I am getting to that point with mega-events, and that would be a tragedy.

How estranged then are the Olympics, and the World Cup, from Pierre de Coubertin’s Olympic credo?

Oh, it’s like another universe! The baron’s credo died a long time ago. This was a man who envisaged the Olympics. “It’s not the winning but the taking part that counts,” is often quoted, but I see the essence of de Coubertin’s Olympics in the phrase that "the Olympics should be a display of manly virtue for which the reward is the applause of women". Baron de Coubertin created a neo-Hellenic athletic cult of the gentlemen sportsman of the white upper classes of Northern Europe and North America for who sport was a generator of “esprit de corps” and a teacher of moral essence in the pursuit of ruling empires.

Thankfully, that doesn’t cut the icing anymore. It is one of the unintended consequences of history that such motivations and such an ideological framework should have mutated into the Olympics today. The one things the Olympics are not, is a display of manly virtue.

De Coubertin was a “cosmopolitan conservative”?

Yes, that’s a rather nice phrase, I rather like that.

Last question. The Olympics and the World Cup may be at an unredeemable stage, but on Friday the Maracana welcomes the world. What do you expect of the opening ceremony, so often a tool for historic misrepresentation? How will Brazil present, or even rewrite, its history, with the world watching?

I wish I knew. However Brazil is doing it, they will have to be cheap and creative. It was bold to put the directors [Daniela Thomas and Fernando Meirelles] of Linha de Passe and Cidade de Deus, two tremendously good and gritty, serious Brazilian movies of the last decade – of comparable, if not greater cinematic sophistication and seriousness than Danny Boyle, who choreographed the 2012 opening ceremony in London – [at the helm].

With that kind of track record, my expectations would be quite high, but it’s a very difficult gig to tell Brazil’s own story, which is one of much brutality and struggle over the last 120 years since the abolition of slavery and the declaration of the republic. I hope and pray that they don’t go down the Samba-happiness-and-everything-funky-way. I can’t believe that they will. I am going to sit back with an open mind and with an as low a level of cynicism that I can muster engage.