Shop by department, purchase cars, fashion apparel, collectibles, sporting goods, cameras, baby items, and everything else on eBay, the world's online marketplace.
Rio after the GamesThe 2016 Olympic Games have left crumbling stadiums and debt instead of the promised financial and sporting benefits for Rio de Janiero and Brazil.Ten miles away at the Olympic Park, things aren't much better. Earlier this month a fire from a flying lantern torched the roof of the Rio velodrome, badly damaging its Siberian Pine track. After the Games, the city solicited bids for private companies to run the park, but no one bid, leaving Brazil's Ministry of Sport with the task - and expense. The maintenance alone will cost the government approximately $14 million this year. Rio's new mayor, Marcelo Crivella, has scrapped plans to turn the handball arena into four public schools.
And the 31 towers that made up the athletes village, which were set to be transformed into luxury condos, now sit largely vacant.Even some of the medals awarded to the athletes have tarnished or cracked, with more than 10 percent of them sent back to Brazil for repair. Rio officials blame poor handling by the athletes.Almost a year since the Games closed, the Rio 2016 Organizing Committee still owes $40 million to creditors.
Bloomberg reported in April that the Olympic organizers were. In July, the organizing committee asked the International Olympic Committee for help with its debt; the IOC said no.Promises that the Olympics would modernize Rio and make its streets safer and favelas cleaner have also failed. According to Brazil's Institute of Public Safety, street robberies are up 48 percent and deadly assaults by 21 percent, to the highest rates since 2009. In the first three months of 2017, violent crime spiked 26 percent compared with the same period in 2016.
The state of Rio is still unable to pay its teachers, hospital workers, police and other public employees on time, if at all. Many favelas still lack running water or proper sewage removal. 'The promised legacy of the Olympics achieving a safe city for all people was not delivered,' Amnesty International wrote in its September 2016. 'Instead a legacy of human rights violations endures.' Largely overlooked through much of the post-Rio commotion are the Brazilian athletes.
Not only the ones like Wu, who achieved the highest levels of success, but also the next generation. Sponsors have dried up. Elite coaches have fled the country. Training centers have closed. And athletes wonder how - or even if - they're still going to be able to compete. More From DoubletruckDoubletruck is the home for ESPN storytelling, a place to find great features, investigations and character portraits.At the world championship in Budapest, Hungary, last month, Brazil fielded a team of just 16 swimmers, its smallest since 2007.
That was double the number of competitors Brazil initially thought it could afford to send.While U.S. Athletes receive no funding directly from the government, most Brazilian athletes couldn't support themselves without their government stipends. And although the cracks in Brazilian government started long before the Rio Games, the funding continued through the Games. Today it's as much a political move as anything because it's the only money that goes directly to the athletes.'
At the end of 2014, after the soccer World Cup, the country was already breaking,' Okimoto says. 'If the Olympics hadn't been in Brazil, our dream would have ended right there. The investments would have stopped. It didn't stop. But when that all ended, nobody had a plan. Nobody knew what to do in this new reality.'
Leonardo Picciani, the Minister of Sport in Brazil, disputes the notion that there was no plan. According to research done by the Sports Ministry, more than 70 percent of Brazilians agree there should be public investment in sports - it just has to be administered the right way, free of corruption.' I do not think Brazil failed in Rio 2016,' he says. 'The basis of Brazilian sport was planted in terms of infrastructure and conditions for athletes to train.
But the governance has to be improved. We have to waste less money and have less bureaucracy and administrative issues and instead have more athletes in more competitions.' The aftermath of the Rio Games has left many Brazilian athletes worried about their competitive future.Mauro Pimentel for ESPNRafaela Silva still has trouble getting out of the house to take a walk along one of Rio's famed beaches or even go to the mall. A year after she won Brazil's first gold in Rio, the 25-year-old still isn't used to the attention that has come along with her 57-kilogram victory in judo.The cruel, racially driven messages that followed a disappointing performance in London 2012 led her to almost quit the sport, but they have been replaced by words of encouragement and pride. Her social media followers have jumped from 10,000 to 307,000 in Instagram and she also has just over 72,000 Twitter followers. She trains at Institute Reacao, a nonprofit organization that promotes human development and social inclusion through sports. She is one of the children who benefited most from the project and has added a major sponsor in Nike.
Though she won't say how much her sponsorship is worth, she and the owner of the institute, former Olympic medalist Flavio Canto, charge $10,000 to speak together.She knows her reality is not the norm. 'In Brazil, only the gold medal is really appreciated,' Silva says. 'The athletes who won silver, bronze or didn't medal at all are having far more problems. These are the ones to think about.' Of the 19 medals Brazil won in Rio, only seven of them were gold, including men's soccer and volleyball, sports that already had strong support in Brazil. More From ESPN BrazilWhat is Rio's Olympic legacy? It depends on who you talk to in Brazil.
An ESPN Brazil report finds that Olympic Park is still racking up thousands of dollars in debt each month, with no Plan B in sight.' Before the Olympics, the crisis was already big, but the Olympics helped people forget about it for two weeks,' Silva says. 'Afterward, the athletes wanted to celebrate their accomplishments, but the country was waking up in the middle of more and more scandals. The media turned quickly to political issues, the economic crisis, and the athletes lost sponsorships and attention.
They've been forgotten.' Before the Games, Silva and her judo teammates decided they would equally divide the prize offered to Olympic medalists by the Brazilian Judo Confederation, an amount that totaled $166,000 for its one gold and two bronze medals.
Instead of pocketing at least $55,000, Rafaela took home about $11,000.' Of course I would like to have had more for the medal, but we thought it would be more fair to split between everyone,' she says. 'We all fight the same way. This money helped those who had no sponsor.'
The help was needed after Rousseff's replacement, Michel Temer, suspended certain stipend programs for six months - blocking pay to medalists from national, continental and world championships while keeping Olympic medalist stipends intact. The chance to apply for new stipends is slated to restart in August; so, under the best-case scenario, athletes will begin receiving their funding again in December. Silva worries about the impact this will have on Brazilian sports in the run-up to Tokyo.' Everybody will want a good performance in 2020, but sports are no longer a priority,' Silva says. 'We understand the government had to decrease the investment.
How can you justify the expense of millions on sports when we have no hospitals?'
Comments are closed.
|
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
March 2023
Categories |