The opening ceremonies
For months, news coverage has concentrated on deep concerns surrounding these games, not the achievements of athletes qualifying for national teams. That’s a shame, because for many participants the games are a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to represent their country. But who can say what the spotlight will be on in Brazil?
Health concerns have centered on the Zika virus. Athletes who’ve decided to stay away include some of the world’s top golfers and tennis players, stars who don’t need the Olympics to bolster their careers. Others, for whom the spotlight comes every four years, have faced a difficult decision. And Zika is just the start. The New York Times and others have reported about raw sewage in the waters off Rio de Janeiro, with high levels of rotoviruses that can cause diarrhea, or contain drug-resistant “superbacteria’’ that can be fatal. Sailors and marathon swimmers will have to put that out of their minds — and their mouths — when they compete.
On land, the Australian team delayed moving into the Olympic Village because of blocked toilets, leaking pipes and exposed wiring. It has been reported that several countries hired their own workers to fix shoddy construction. Fear of terrorism remains high, though Brazil will have a reported 88,000 police and military personnel on hand. Everyday crime is a worry, too. The Times reports that “Rio is awash in weapons, with drug gangs wielding control over parts of the city.”
Recent revelations about a Russian doping scandal, allegedly state-sponsored and involving the nation’s intelligence service, raised questions not just about the integrity of events, but about the ability of international sports officials to police such matters. Officials from the Olympics and the World Anti-Doping Agency are pointing fingers at each other for being lax in investigating suspicions. They both might be right.
Observing all this, many New Englanders are breathing a collective sigh of relief that Boston abandoned its bid to host the 2024 Games. With traffic patterns that resemble mazes, and political corruption something of a local sport, the prospects looked alarming.
Dartmouth classics professor Paul Christensen recently argued in a column reprinted in these pages that the cost of hosting the Olympic Games is putting them out of reach for most world cities. With cost overruns, he wrote, the Rio Games could run to $20 billion; only the wealthiest cities, or those in nations such as China or Russia where profit and loss are calculated differently, can reasonably take them on. He called for re-imagining the games and dispersing events around the world.
The idea offers advantages, but we doubt it will happen until the Olympics as we know them collapse of their own weight — let’s hope that it won’t be this year. Better that the focus falls now on individual athletes — not wealthy professionals who stand aloof, but those who have dedicated themselves against long odds to reach the top of their sport, even when there’s little financial reward. Sometimes they are uplifting examples of what one person can achieve: While all around them are imperfections, they grasp the gold.