RIO DE JANEIRO — Excuse me IOC. Have you got a minute? We need to talk and it’s kind of serious.
You are staging a 17-day sports festival in a city that’s under extreme duress. Rio de Janeiro and Brazil are in the throes of the worst economic recession in three decades. Rio’s economy shrank by almost four per cent in 2015 and a similar number is expected for 2016. Inflation and unemployment are at 12-year highs. As a result, spending has been cut in health care and education, and government workers, including police and firemen, have missed pay cheques.
This might explain why police and firefighters greeted Olympic visitors with this cheery sign last week: “Welcome to hell. Police and firefighters don’t get paid. Whoever comes to Rio de Janeiro will not be safe.”
Didn’t see that? Never mind. Onwards.
The bill for your sports festival is officially estimated at $12 million US, but no one in their right mind believes that will be the final accounting. $20 billion is more like it. Or $30 billion. Whatever. But look at the bright side. Sochi cost more than $50 million — and that was just for the Winter Games — so maybe Rio is getting off cheaply.
Except you know it isn’t.
Look, I’m going to spare you the usual appeal to your conscience. Nor will I ask how you sleep at night. But it should be clear to anyone with the common sense of a house fly that the Olympic model is no longer sustainable and has to be revised.
A new plan is needed. A new way of doing business is imperative. With that in mind, here’s a modest proposal: set up an Olympic rota — British Open style — with six sites for the summer games and six sites for their winter counterparts.
What’s that? Well, I don’t know if it’s a brilliant idea. That’s not me for to say. But let’s consider the benefits.
First off, you’ll no longer have to endure the public relations nightmares you encounter when you come to a place like Rio, or Athens in 2004, or Torino in 2006 or . . . never mind, you get the picture. The modern Olympics have simply outgrown all but a handful of cities on our planet. Those cities, as it happens, come complete with ready-made facilities. For the summer there’s London, Paris, Los Angeles, Beijing, New York and, after 2020, Tokyo. For the winter, you can take your pick from a couple of European centres, chose between Calgary and Vancouver as a Canadian host city and do the same with Salt Lake and Lake Placid in the States. Pyeongchang will be ready after 2018. And, what they hey, you can always go back to Sochi.
Putin, after all, paid for the privilege.
Now, look at this list and tell me what’s not to like. There’s a nice geographical balance there, although the southern hemisphere is a tad under-represented. There’s a good mix of sprawling megalopolises, mid-size cities and, potentially, charming mountain towns.
There are also opportunities to rekindle the romance with your most ardent suitors: the Chinese, the South Koreans and Vladdy. And there’s enough American content to keep NBC happy because, lord knows, NBC must be kept happy.
Add it all up, and here’s what the Olympic rota would give you: More efficient and cost-effective Olympics held in destination cities with the necessary infrastructure and wherewithal to host the Games. They’ll move around enough to create variety. But you won’t have to worry about the unwieldy selection process, which has awarded the Games to places that simply can’t afford them and, lest we forget, opened up some of your members to, er, the temptation of illegal inducements.
As for Rio, you can see how these Olympics are going to play out. Despite the doomsday scenarios the Games will be a qualified success. The TV pictures — Copacabana Beach, Ipanema, Sugarloaf Mountain, Christ the Redeemer — will be spectacular and the cameras won’t get close enough to pick up the nastier bits floating in the water.
The Cariocas will also hold up their end of the bargain because the citizens of Rio love a party, the louder and more lavish the better. Every year, some two million people gather on Copacabana to usher in the New Year and, by the next day, most of the mess is cleaned up. There’s a spirit to these people that shines through the dimmer aspects of their city and it will illuminate these Games.
In the end, that will be the Olympics’ saving grace.
But that’s not really the point, is it.
Rio has 3,000 problems, none of which are addressed by a 17-day sports festival that carries a $25-whatever-billion price tag. Those problems are so extreme, in fact, it’s an obscenity to stick this city with a tab of this magnitude.
The cleanup from this mess is going to take a lot longer than one day, but there are places that can handle an Olympics. Please go there.
ewilles@postmedia.com