Once the ‘Marvellous City’, Rio 2016 hasn’t even started and it’s already a marvellous mess

So here we are: the first Olympic Games in South America, notably in the country of the future, as Stefan Zweig put it; the first Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, the “Marvellous City”, now a marvellous mess – a Disney World of gleaming, shining stadiums in the middle of uncontrollable, sprawling urbanism, punctuated by transport chaos, corruption, abject poverty and an upper class gorging on more riches.

Little transformative remains from the moment when Pele and Luiz Inacio Da Silva wept openly at an otherwise frigid ceremony in the Danish capital Copenhagen in 2009, when Jacques Rogge, the nondescript then International Olympic Committee president, pulled Rio de Janeiro out of the envelope – much to the disappointment of Chicago and Barack Obama – and exclaimed, in a feeble attempt to sound cosmopolitan, “Rio de Ganeiro”.

Rio’s preparations have been diabolical. Yet underwhelming preparations have always been a feature of modern Olympic Games, even in Athens in 1896 when The New York Times correspondent wrote, “There were plenty of old tin cans and rubbish scattered where once the silver Ulysses sparkled to the sea: the grove of Academe reminded me of picturesque bits in shanty town.”

A hellish nightmare

In recent history, Athens in 2004 was very late in delivering venues that ultimately turned into hapless white elephants. Beijing in 2008 was castigated for its forceful evictions and poor human rights record. London 2012’s sporting and Stratford legacy was non-existent. Across the board, Rio de Janeiro is, however, an outright Olympic disaster zone, a hellish nightmare that even Dante wouldn’t have conjured up.

Tick the box of Olympic pathologies in Rio: Forced evictions? Yes. Useless real estate developments? Yes. Environmental disaster? Yes. White elephants? Yes (probably). Eduardo Paes enjoying himself? Yes. Strictly speaking, from a technical point of view, that last one is not an Olympic pathology, but Rio’s flamboyant mayor, who so disarmingly delivers TED-talks, is at the heart of the Olympic fallacy, turning a blind eye to his city’s real needs.

The sum of Rio’s problems are conjoined by a nationwide economic downturn with the contentious impeachment of President Dilma Rouseff by a corrupt parliament, the Petrobras scandal and the threat of the Zika virus. The Russian doping scandal and, in particular, the IOC’s meek, if not non-existent, response to it, have aggravated Rio’s predicament with a city, a country and the landlord (the IOC) in an institutional crisis of hitherto unseen proportions.

But, yet again, the real tragedy is the absence of a legacy, the self-proclaimed justification that comes with the modern Olympic Games, often extensively elaborated on in lofty and flowery lexicon in bid books. Beijing proclaimed to become a green city in 2008, akin to an alcoholic swearing off booze; London wanted Britishers to play sport again in 2012, today, in fact, less do so. At least, Rio is being honest – the bid book projected social transformation across the city, but today, there is little pretending. Few promises have been fulfilled.

Little social transformation

Rio’s inhabitants, in particular in Zona Norte – where the vast majority of the city’s population lives and commutes an inordinate number of hours on ramshackle buses to get to work – could have greatly benefited from the Olympic Games. Both the transport and sewage systems could have received a major update and boost. Instead, Guanabara Bay remains an open sewer and the bus is still in vogue for much of Rio’s giant underclass.

The Bus Rapid Transit system and the extension of Rio’s vertical metro system from Leblon to Barra Da Tijuca, where the Olympic Park is the gravitational point of the Olympic Games, benefits wealthy Cariocas, ferrying the rich from gated condominium to the mall and back.

In the end, the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro are a further manifestation of “accelerated development”. That’s a mantra for uncritically placing public money in the service of private profit creating neo-liberal dream-worlds wherein democratic processes are suspended, public space militarise, and urban space restructured in the image of global capital, according to Davis and Monk.

In 2014, the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, a 17-day extravaganza, came with an astronomical price tag of $55 billion. The figure of $51 billion to transform the region is the de facto accepted total cost by virtue of its frequent repetition in the media, but it does not correspond with reality according to Martin Muller, a professor at the University of Zurich: Sochi overran its projected budget of $12.5 billion 4.5 times by spending $38 billion on non-sports-related capital costs.

Rio is a mini-Sochi. It is, presumably under the auspices of mayor Paes, another neo-liberal heist, but that model of hosting Olympic Games is not tenable. It plunges the IOC, a select group of aristocrats, into a near-existential crisis – more so than a lack of bidders for future Olympic Games – for they always proclaim to be a social movement? Which social movement – one based on greed and graft?

Therein lies Rio’s true legacy, argues David Goldblatt, that profound reform – not the window-dressing of Agenda 2020 – is needed in the Olympic cosmos. With Rio, the (hyperbolical) global capital of dysfunctionality, except for the great and the good, the Olympic myth has been pierced again. Future Olympic hosts must simply deliver equitable Games.