The smash-hit London Olympics were nearing a close in August 2012, and I found myself in an elevator at the main news media center with a small delegation of observers from the next Summer Games, in Rio de Janeiro.
They looked and sounded worried. One of them said, “I really hope that everyone does not expect Rio to be better than this.”
In truth, almost everyone does not. Neither Brazil nor any of its neighbors have staged an Olympics, and it was clear that Rio, despite its high profile and abundant charms, was going to face organizational challenges of a higher magnitude. The trade-off, however, seemed worth it to bring the Games to new territory.
Yet even with lowered expectations, the preparation for South America’s first Olympics is clearly not up to snuff. And this week Olympic and international sports officials, concerned over the lack of construction and commitment in Rio, sounded the alarm in public at the SportAccord Convention in Turkey.
“Perhaps we are perceived as bad boys at this moment, but I think we are the most important ally of the Brazilian organizers because without this alarm we really could be in trouble if we miss some more time,” Francesco Ricci Bitti, the president of the Association of Summer Olympic International Federations, said in a telephone interview on Friday after returning to London.
Ricci Bitti is also the president of the International Tennis Federation and a member of the International Olympic Committee’s coordinating commission for the 2016 Games. He is well acquainted with Rio’s fault lines and visited last month. Two major concerns: the Deodoro complex, essentially Rio’s secondary Olympic Park, where major construction work has yet to begin, and the first Olympic golf course, which does not look remotely ready for golf.
“The organizing committee for the Games is made now of professional, good people, but they have no leverage,” Ricci Bitti said. “So they were always talking about the salad but never about the beef. The timeline for construction is very, very late, and very few federations are confident to have what the bid said. Very few.”
The economic and political context has changed dramatically since Rio’s bid prevailed in 2009. Brazil’s economy is now suffering, and Ricci Bitti said the “great cohesion” between the federal and local levels of government toward the Olympic effort was no longer apparent. The politics have become much more complicated because of public protest and looming elections. Brazil’s leaders — the ones with the real and requisite clout — appear distracted, and not just by the upcoming World Cup.
“Obviously it was not a pleasure to send this strong message, but we are scared that the trend on their side was to postpone everything again for six or eight months because of the two big events: the FIFA World Cup and elections,” Ricci Bitti said. “The government has to move. This was the message that has to be sent. The organizing committee has a cash flow very much lower than they need.”
The reflex is to consider this business as usual, to recall the tumultuous rush before the 2004 Games in Athens with all the delays and doomsayers, who eventually had to concede that the Games turned out swimmingly.
After all, the drumbeat leading into an Olympics is routinely, perhaps systemically, negative.
Michael Pirrie, a key adviser at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney and to the 2012 London Games chief, Sebastian Coe, often makes reference — tongue slightly in cheek — to the six stages of Olympic organization.
“There’s the euphoria of winning the bid, then the shock of understanding the fully massive scale of what’s required,” Pirrie said in an interview. “Then there’s the rise of the instant experts, the people who said you’d never win the bid or that your city or country didn’t need the bid but now are telling you how to deliver the Games.
“Then you have the persecution of the innocent, whereby anybody connected to the organization of the Games is somehow responsible for any major or minor detail of the planning going slightly awry. Then you have the successful delivery of the Games, with the help of the volunteers and everyone involved. And then, finally, you have the glorification of the uninvolved, all the people who sat on the sidelines and watched it all evolve and then suddenly were the ones who helped deliver it.”
Rio still has a chance for a happy ending. As Pirrie points out, “it’s not like they are building a space station.” Although the knowledge transfer between Games has improved, time is dwindling, and what is remarkable and troubling is the number of officials sharing their fears, when they are typically the ones reassuring the public and the news media that all will be sorted out. “I think the situation in Rio is far more serious than anything the I.O.C. faced in Athens,” Michael Payne, a former I.O.C. marketing director who was a consultant to Rio’s successful bid, said. “I don’t think it’s a case of someone shouting wolf or whatever.”
Payne added: “I don’t think the I.O.C. has faced such a serious crisis relative to the delivery of the Summer Games ever. The last time you would have had a crisis of this level impacting on the Games would have been the Moscow-L.A. boycotts in 1980 and 1984.”
Bach has not ruled out moving the Olympics from Rio. But it still seems nearly certain that it will be Rio, two years after Brazil stages this summer’s soccer World Cup, which has plenty of its own concerns.
“I would not recommend to have in the same place and in the same country two events of this kind in the same cycle,” Ricci Bitti said. “But now it’s happening.”
Indeed it is, and the next two years and four months seem guaranteed to be a much wilder ride than they should have been.