IOC: Choice of Rio de Janeiro to host the 2016 Olympic Games (full text)
Searching more than 75 years of world history
The Brazilian authorities on Nov. 11 sought to uncover the cause of a massive power blackout which had plunged nearly half of the country into darkness for up to six hours, amid concerns of energy supply stability for the 2016 Olympic host nation.
At a meeting in Copenhagen (the capital of Denmark) on Oct. 2, the 112-member International Olympic Committee (IOC) had chosen Rio de Janeiro, the second-largest city in Brazil, as the host city for the 31st Olympiad in 2016. Rio de Janeiro overcame concerns relating to infrastructure, transport, and security to defeat Madrid, the capital of Spain, by 66 votes to 32. The other contending cities, Chicago (USA) and Tokyo (the capital of Japan), had been eliminated in two previous rounds of voting.
Immediate context
President Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva travelled to Copenhagen to address the IOC ahead of the Oct. 2 vote. He told delegates: "If you give us this opportunity, you will not regret it. And you can be sure that the games in Rio will be unforgettable, because they will be full of the passion, happiness and creativity of the Brazilian people". Da Silva went on to say: "Looking at the five rings of the Olympic symbol, I see my country in them: a Brazil of men and women from all continents - Americans, Europeans, Africans, Asians, all proud of their origins and prouder of feeling Brazilian".
Importantly, to the IOC, the country had a long history of hosting international sporting events. In 1963, for example, Brazil hosted the 4th Pan American games in Sao Paulo, drawing in thousands of competitors and spectators. In July 2007 the Pan American Games were hosted in Rio, providing even more recent evidence of Brazil's commitment and ability to host international games. Three months later, Brazil was named as the host nation for the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Brazil had won the tournament a record five times and hosted the World Cup once before, in 1950, when they lost 2-1 in the final to Uruguay.
Since the award of the 2016 Olympics to Rio de Janeiro, the city's crime problems, in particular, received a great deal of international attention. Shortly after Rio had been chosen, drug-gang violence wreaked havoc in the city, obliging Brazilian officials to insist that the country would be a safe host for the 2016 Games. Fighting on Oct. 17 between gang rivals in the Morro dos Macacos ("Monkey Hill") favela, some 8km south-west of one of the zones where Olympic events would be held, left over 20 people dead, a large number injured, a police helicopter shot down and eight buses set on fire. Officials were forced to admit that there were "big issues" facing the city in securing the games from violence, but also highlighted the fact that London faced security problems and had suffered four suicide bomb attacks on July 7, 2005, the day after the IOC session that chose the city to host the 2012 Olympic Games.
The final IOC report on Rio had made little mention of the security situation other than to euphemistically note that the city "faces public security challenges". FIFA, for its part, had earlier declared that Brazil's "authorities have the know-how and resources to improve the situation before 2014, and would have the determination to manage it during the 2014 FIFA World Cup". The IOC expressed "confidence" on Oct. 21 that Brazil would deliver a safe Olympics in 2016. "Security is of course a very important aspect of any Olympic Games no matter where it is in the world," IOC spokesman Mark Adams said.
Nonetheless, the very public day of violence in Rio on Oct. 17 underscored the challenge of creating a secure environment for hundreds of thousands of foreign tourists in a country where close to 6,000 people were killed each year, more than 1,000 of them by police. Recent attempts at community policing in at least two favelas, including one in the tourist enclave of South Side, had provided some grounds for optimism. By stationing officers inside the community rather than just storming it at the first signs of trouble, police had gained a measure of confidence and credibility among residents. However, the programme had been limited, and the task ahead remained enormous. Out of Rio's more than 1,000 favelas, the so-called Pacifier Police Divisions had been introduced in just four; authorities lacked either the resources or the manpower to implement them all across the city.
Reaction and outlook
The awarding of the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games to Brazil came after several years of strategy, planning, and arduous efforts by President da Silva. The president was rewarded with two global events to showcase Brazil and to signal the country's growing international influence. The Olympic Games, in particular, offered the government the opportunity to reaffirm its growing international reputation as a leader among emerging nations.
President da Silva has been instrumental in the forging of closer relations with the leaders of the three other biggest emerging economies - Russia, India and China. The first summit of the so-called BRIC group was held in June in Yekaterinburg, Russia, and it was agreed that a second summit would be hosted by Brazil in 2010. The BRIC countries accounted for some 40 per cent of the world's population and at least 15 per cent of the world economy.
The selection of Rio added a major international endorsement to Brazil's rapidly elevating status. The Olympic symbolism had been a major positive factor for the growth and regeneration of other chosen cities, specifically Tokyo, Seoul, Barcelona and Beijing. The decision to award the Olympics to Rio de Janeiro would also provide Brazil with the opportunity to show the world that it possessed the talent, infrastructural capacity, and political commitment needed to compete competitively in global political (and athletic) games. Analysts were generally agreed that such an endorsement could only boost President da Silva's ability to shape international discussions and forge closer ties with other foreign leaders.
At the domestic economic level, analysts have been divided over the potential benefits to Brazil of the Olympic Games. Alberto Murray Neto, a former member of the Brazilian Olympic Committee but a stern critic of the Rio bid, remarked that granting the Olympic Games to Brazil was "an act of extreme social insensitivity". Neto contended that until Brazil had "a gold medal in health, education, transportation, food, basic sanitation and electricity; until we have a policy of sustainable development that drastically reduces pollution and deforestation; until sports are accessible to everyone, bringing the Olympic Games to Brazil is nothing more than a demagogical government action aligned with personal interests".
Other analysts have pointed to the positive socio-economic developments that had taken place in more industrialised countries such as Spain when Barcelona hosted the Olympics in 1992. Well-planned infrastructure development had, historically, been an effective driver of long-term economic growth, particularly for urban centres which already possessed the critical mass of economic activity to benefit from these improvements. The key would be to create infrastructure enhancements with long-term uses and not just short-term applications for the Games. Regardless of the World Cup or Olympics, Brazil had survived the recent global crisis more successfully than most other nations as a result of its growing internal market. With the prospect of the World Cup and the Olympics, consumer and investor confidence should increase markedly and further social improvements would follow naturally.
Historical context
The first Olympic Games were held at Olympia in Greece in 776 BC. The Greek calendar was based on the Olympiad, the four-year period between games. The victors of the early games were crowned with wreaths from a sacred olive tree that grew behind the temple of Zeus. The Olympic Games were held without interruption in ancient Greece and even took place in 480 BC during the Persian Wars, coinciding with the Battle of Thermopylae. The ancient games were eventually abolished in 393 by the Christian Byzantine Emperor Theodosius I.
The successful campaign to revive the Olympics was started in France by Baron Pierre de Coubertin late in the 19th century. De Coubertin and Demetrios Vikelas formed the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in June 1894. The first of the modern Summer Games was held in April 1896, in Athens, the capital of Greece, and 14 nations participated. Summer Games were subsequently held in Paris, France (1900), St Louis, USA (1904), London, UK (1908), and Stockholm, Sweden (1912). The 7th Summer Games were scheduled to be held in Berlin, Germany, in 1916, but were cancelled due to World War I.
The 1920 Summer Olympics were held in Antwerp, Belgium, and were contested by athletes representing 29 countries. Paris hosted the 1924 Summer Games and that same year the first Winter Games were held in Chamonix, France. Beginning with the 1924 Games, the Winter Olympics would continue to be held in the same year as the Summer Games until 1992. In 1928 the 9th Summer Games were held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and the 2nd Winter Games in St Moritz, Switzerland. The next Summer and Winter Games, in 1932, were both held in the USA (Los Angeles and Lake Placid, respectively).
The 11th Summer Games were opened in Berlin by Chancellor Adolf Hitler. Berlin had won the bid to host the Games over Barcelona in April 1931, two years before the Nazis came to power. The Berlin Games have been remembered for Hitler's failed attempt to use them to prove his theories of Aryan racial superiority. As it turned out, the most popular hero of the Games was the African-American sprinter and long jumper Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals in the 100m, 200m, 4x100m relay and long jump. The Olympic Games were not held in either 1940 or 1944 due to World War II, and London was called upon at short notice to host them in 1948. The 15th Summer Games were held in the capital of Finland, Helsinki in 1952 and Israel and the Soviet Union competed for the first time. Concerns that Cold War rivalries would lead to clashes proved unfounded. Particularly impressive were the Soviet women gymnasts who won the team competition easily, beginning a trend that would continue for 40 years until the Soviet Union broke up into separate republics. In 1956 the Summer Games arrived in the southern hemisphere (Melbourne, Australia) for the first time. Australian quarantine laws were too severe to allow the entry of foreign horses, so the equestrian events were held separately in Stockholm. The 17th Summer Games were held in the Italian capital Rome in 1960. Western Germany and Eastern Germany participated in a combined all-German team, while the People's Republic of China (Communist China) refused to take part in protest at the attendance of Chinese Nationalist athletes under the designation "Formosa". The Rome Games were the last in which South Africa was allowed to participate for a period of some 32 years - until 1992 - as the ICO would not tolerate the apartheid policies of the South African government.
The 1964 Tokyo Summer Games were the first to be held in Asia. The carrier of the Olympic flame, Yoshinori Sakai, was chosen because he was born on Aug. 6, 1945, the day the USA had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, in homage to the victims and as a call for world peace. The 19th Summer Games in Mexico City in 1968 were the first to be hosted by a developing country. Czech gymnast Vera Caslavska won four gold and two silver medals - her victories were especially dramatic as she defeated Soviet gymnasts two months after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia .
The 20th Summer Games in Munich (West Germany) in September 1972 were interrupted in the second week when eight Palestinian extremists broke into the Olympic Village, killing two members of the Israeli team and taking nine hostages. In the ensuing battle, all nine Israeli hostages were killed, as were five of the terrorists and one policeman. In defiance of the terrorists, the IOC ordered the competitions to resume after a pause of 34 hours. The 1976 Summer Games in Montreal (Canada) were marred by an African boycott involving 22 countries. The boycott was organised by Tanzania to protest the fact that the New Zealand rugby team, the "All Blacks", had toured apartheid South Africa and that New Zealand was scheduled to compete in the Olympic Games. The 22nd Summer Olympics were held in Moscow (the capital of the Soviet Union) in 1980. A US-led boycott reduced the number of participating nations to 80, the lowest number since 1956, as part of a series of measures to protest against the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan . The 23rd Summer Games were held in Los Angeles and, whilst a "revenge boycott" led by the Soviet Union depleted the field in certain sports, 140 National Olympic Committees competed, which was a record at the time. The Los Angeles bid had been criticised for depending heavily on existing facilities and corporate sponsors. However, the Games produced a healthy profit and became the model for future Games. Awarding the 1998 Summer Games to South Korea was intended to provide the impetus for the country to embrace democracy. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) boycotted, and was joined by a few other countries. Canadian Ben Johnson set a world record in the 100m sprint, but tested positive for steroids. Johnson became the first world-famous athlete to be disqualified for using drugs.
The 25th Summer Games in the Spanish city of Barcelona in 1992 were boycott-free, due to the momentous political changes of the late 1980s and early 1990s, including the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of West and East Germany ; the dissolution of the Soviet Union ; and the release of Nelson Mandela and the start of the process of the dissolution of the apartheid system in South Africa. The 26th Summer Games were held in US city of Atlanta in 1996. For the first time in Olympic history, all 197 recognised National Olympic Committees were represented at the Games. However, the Games were marred by a bomb attack on the Centennial Olympic Park which killed one person. The 2000 Summer Games were held in the Australian city of Sydney and four years later, the Games returned to Greece , the birthplace of both the ancient and modern Olympic Games. A record 204 National Olympic Committees took part in the 2008 Summer Games held in the Chinese capital, Beijing. Despite some areas of controversy, mainly concerned with human rights, the Games were outstandingly successful from China's point of view. The Games symbolised China's arrival on the world stage as a major power, not only in sports but more generally.
