We need to talk about Deodoro. As part of a strategy that was “aligned with the city’s wider development plan” the Rio Olympics bid committee proposed to stage the current Games in four different zones. Far from the city centre, Barra da Tijuca is at least a humming hive of activity, home to the athletes and media villages, as well as the aquatics centre, the velodrome and tennis arena, among other venues.
Further east, between 40 and 90 minutes by coach, depending on the traffic, Copacabana served as a picturesque start and finishing point for both the men’s and women’s cycling road races, while its famous beach is the location of a stunning bespoke arena for beach volleyball. Events such as sailing, rowing and marathon swimming have taken place, or will do, on or in its waters that are so beautiful to look at but not so pleasant to smell or swallow.
A short hop along the metro, just a little further along the coast, is another Olympic zone that needs little introduction. Maracanã staged the opening ceremony in its iconic and eponymous local stadium and it is here the curtain will come down on the Games next Sunday. In the interim the area’s Havelange Olympic Stadium is home to the track and field events, while the Olympic volleyball, water polo and archery are also being staged nearby.
Finally, in the north of the city there is Deodoro. The home of a massive army base located between two favelas, it is without question the runt of the Rio 2016 litter. Sprawling, often difficult to access and with various venues several miles apart, it is quite evidently the place those sports nowhere else wanted have gone to die. If Deodoro were a racehorse you’d do the humane thing: throw a blanket over it before erecting the screens and reaching for a shotgun.
The venue for 11 different sports, almost all of them the kind entrants to the London 2012 ticket lottery were fervently hoping not to get, Deodoro is home to equestrian sports such as dressage, show jumping and eventing. It hosts BMX, mountain biking and canoe slalom. It is the place to go to see shooting, hockey and rugby sevens. In what is almost certainly the most damning possible indictment of any Olympic venue, it drew the short straw that is modern pentathlon.
It was not meant to be like this. The 2009 vision for Deodoro suggested the whole point of having the Olympics spread over such a wide area was that it would force organisers to upgrade the transport network. While the famous Metro Line 4 to Barra was finished just in time, the rest of this vision appears to have been pared back to the point of being abandoned. Deodoro was slated to house the sort of X-games style sports that would appeal to the youth and turn the heads of the next generation. A new BMX and white water centre have been built and stand in splendid isolation about 30 minutes’ walk in searing heat from civilisation and the nearest station.
A three-times Olympian who finished fourth in the 800m final won by Steve Ovett at the 1980 Moscow Olympics, Agberto Guimarães is the Rio 2016 sport director. “I would like to see more people here,” he says of Deodoro. “I would say we have to work a little bit more with the neighbours here and perhaps establish a social programme with the city and help organise to bring the people here.”
The neighbours of whom Guimarães speaks hail from the neighbouring Chapadão and Pedreira favela complexes, two of the city’s most violent areas.
Already in these Games a stray bullet has been found in the media tent at one equestrian event, while a coach ferrying journalists from Deodoro’s basketball arena back to Barra da Tijuca has come under late-night attack.
Speaking at the X park, which for all its inaccessibility looks great and will almost certainly look even better when it is finished, Guimarães seems as proud of the place as he is of the new road running next to it. “It is a beautiful road that will remain as a legacy,” he says. Asked, if in five or 10 years’ time we can expect to see an overgrown, graffiti-daubed and decrepit Rio X park featuring in the inevitable photo essay detailing the sad decline of once proud Olympic venues, Guimarães looks slightly wounded. “I hope not,” he says. “I don’t think so.”
Waving out towards the churning waters of the canoe slalom course he says: “This was the only place open for the public before the Olympics were inaugurated.” Further investigation reveals that so many local children were breaking in to avail themselves of the expensive facilities that the local mayor decided to open it as a pool.
