Dan Wetzel
Aug 3, 2016, 12:57 AM
RIO
DE JANEIRO – On Oct. 2, 2009, the International Olympic Committee
awarded the 2016 Summer Olympics to Rio. An impromptu party broke out on
Copacabana Beach here, the city government declared the day a holiday
for workers, and Brazil’s then-president wept at the news that his
country would be able to showcase itself on the global stage.
“Today
is the most emotional day in my life, the most exciting day of my
life,” then President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva stated. “Now, we are
going to show the world we can be a great country.”
The
Opening Ceremony of the Olympics is Friday, and, thus far, Brazil is
not showing the world how great of a country it is or could be.
Like
with most Olympic host nations, the billions of dollars spent on
building and hosting these Games were sold to the public as a long-term
investment designed to convince tourists it’s a place to visit and
convince international business leaders in which to invest. It was
especially important for Brazil, a still-developing nation and the first
in South America to host the Games. Along with the 2014 World Cup,
sports were seen as a national marketing vehicle.
So
far, however, it’s been an unmitigated disaster overwhelmed by
pre-Olympic publicity focused on pollution, disease, corruption,
traffic, poverty, infrastructure inefficiencies and general discord.
“If
[hosting the Olympics were] about changing perceptions of Brazil it
would appear to have backfired in a serious perceptual sense,” Mark
Ritson, adjunct professor at Melbourne Business School in Australia and
an international branding expert, told Yahoo Sports. “They have spent
billions to confirm and even worsen the negative perceptions of Brazil
to a global audience.”
Lula
da Silva is no longer Brazil’s president, although he remains mired in a
wide-raging corruption investigation concerning bribes paid out by
construction companies, among other offenses, during his time in office.
His successor, Dilma Rousseff, who served as his chief of staff, has
been stripped of her powers as she undergoes impeachment proceedings
that stem, in part, from the same pay-for-play scandal.
There
remains global skepticism that Brazil won the bid process outright,
since at the time of the vote IOC officials didn’t just explain away the
obvious challenges of hosting the Games here, they pretended they
didn’t exist. “There was absolutely no flaw in the bid,” then-IOC
president Jacques Rogge comically declared. Sure, other than all the
obvious flaws. The ongoing political sagas – internal and external –
have done little to assure that Brazil is a place for fair business.
Rio
and Brazil, as a whole, are broke, as billions spent on construction
and operational costs drain coffers. There remain concerns over the
spread of the Zika virus, which can cause birth defects. The waters
around the city are so polluted with sewage and various viruses that
athletes who must compete in them have been told not to open their
mouths while swimming. Clearly, the government did little to no work on
the sewage problems, despite seven years to work on them. Crime is
rampant. Traffic can be soul-crushing. Poor construction standards are
obvious. The pre-Games headlines around the world have been toxic.
That day in 2009 – celebrating the chance to redefine this city and country – seems a long, long time ago.
“They’ve
gotten off to a bad start,” Jonathan Schroeder, a professor at
Rochester Institute of Technology with a focus on branding, told Yahoo
Sports. “The general sense is they are failing to live up to
international standards.”
As
a microcosm there is Copacabana, the famed beach that hosted the
initial bid-winning party with tens of thousands of people drinking and
dancing to samba music in typical freewheeling Brazilian ways. It is the
cultural and emotional center of the city.
Copacabana
will host the beach volleyball competition, although concerns over
erosion required a five-foot-high sand wall to be constructed. The wall
is not just unsightly, robbing the Games of one of its most beautiful
backdrops, thieves have exploited it to rob beachgoers of the view of
police. Moreover, last month mutilated body parts washed ashore, and no
one is fully confident that swimming in its waters is completely safe.
In
reality, the chief motivation for hosting an Olympics is often a
government, run by politicians, throwing contracts at the construction
industry who in turn donate back (above or below the table). The money
is in the concrete, steel and labor deals, which run into the billions.
The
grander, and still true, reason for hosting, though, is to promote a
city or nation to the world – to become a so-called, gold-plated
“Olympic City.”
“The
classic example is the Seoul Olympics in 1988,” Schroeder said of the
Summer Games held in what was then a somewhat mysterious Asian nation.
“It really put Korea on the map and showed the world a modern,
industrial nation. It is also credited with giving a book to a lot of
Korean brands, such as Samsung.”
Brazil,
with a population of more than 200 million, was hoping for the same.
Everything is not completely lost. It still boasts a rich and dynamic
culture. Pollution concerns aside, it is a place of wondrous natural
beauty. A Rio beach party is still a Rio beach party.
If
the Games can be pulled off, perhaps that narrative can emerge. The
visuals for international broadcasts remain the same – the soaring
Sugarloaf Mountain, the smiles and laughs of partying locals, the Christ
the Redeemer statue looking down over everything.
Raising “awareness of Brazil as a tourist destination might yet prove worthwhile,” Ritson said.
It
will have to be a flawless Games, however, with, Schroeder notes, a
particularly dynamic Opening Ceremony, which was so powerful for the
Beijing Games in 2008 that it overwhelmed pre-Olympic stories over
human-rights failures and income inequality. Even then, though,
Schroeder said issues with raw sewage in the waters of actual Olympic
competition venues – rowing, sailing and the triathlon – could prove
impossible to overcome. “That’s something new,” he noted.
In
real time, the health and safety concerns have left the ticket market
soft since fewer tourists than predicted are expected to come. The Wall
Street Journal reported that hotel occupancy in Brazil was just 51.6
percent in the second quarter of 2016, down nearly 8 percent from just a
year before. Zika and pollution are particularly troubling for younger
potential tourists.
Compounding
the issue is that in specific first-world markets there has been
considerably bad publicity about these Games. That includes, most
notably, Australia, whose Olympic Committee deemed its athlete housing
uninhabitable last week. It went from bad to worse when their quarters
suffered a fire only to have returning athletes discover some laptops
were stolen.
This
isn’t the first, and won’t be the last, Olympics that has gone off the
rails. Russia spent $51 billion on the 2014 Winter Games with the stated
goal of promoting the Sochi area as a vacation destination – with both
world-class skiing and a warm, tropical (it boasts palm trees)
waterfront along the Black Sea.
Shoddy
construction and attention on stray dog eradication and human-rights
crackdowns damaged that storyline. The Sochi Games never really
recovered.
So
this is the challenge for Rio and Brazil, which gambled big they could
pull this off and now face the reality they are seen as less safe, less
clean, less honest and less modern than if they had just never bid.
“And
the opportunity cost of spending their money on something other than
the Olympiad cannot be ignored either,” Ritson said. Something such as
billions on building out pro-business infrastructure and widespread
tourism advertising that could pay dividends down the line.
The
Olympic torch gets lit on Friday. The gleeful party is a distant
memory. Everyone here is holding their breath – in and out of the water.
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