Behind the doors there are other doors. Beyond the path lies another path. And at the end of it all, sweat beading your arms, over a bridge, up a sandy incline, two and a half hours from central Rio, if you follow the sound of distant gunfire, if the sun doesn’t get you first, you might just find the Rio 2016 Olympic shooting venue.
Neal Cassady, literary muse of the beat writers, once drove across America at the wheel of an old greyhound bus with the word “Further” in its destination slot. For a more authentic sense of a journey without ends, of eternally questing, he might have just gone with “Deodoro Olympic Park”.
But then, sometimes a journey is all about the journey. Often – and I can’t emphasise this enough – it’s about not getting there at all, or at least not getting there in a good and sensible time. Roadtest Rio, they said. This was the idea on the first day of these Games, a chance to make the journey around four main venues, to get a feeling for the tides and currents of Olympic Rio, move with the spectators, see how the city has shifted into this ongoing mobilisation.
First stop was Copacabana beachfront, taking in the start of the men’s road cycling race. From there it would be on to the shooting to witness the first gold medal of these Games, won in the event by Virginia Thrasher, a 19-year-old physics student from Springfield, Virginia, who was a figure skater five years ago, switched sports following a family hunting trip, and will now head back to college for her graduation year.
From the shooting the day would shift via sevens rugby through the edges of town to catch the women’s football at the Olympic stadium, where Brazil, Marta and all, would be taking on Sweden. In outline it looked like a full and thorough odyssey through the machinery of Rio 2016.
In the event, stumbling down that scorched path towards the distant pops and cracks, feeling the day drift away in the vastness of Rio’s Olympic plane, it brought home not just the scattered nature of this citywide Olympic project, but beyond that the basic pleasure of travelling through this hospitable, relentlessly beautiful city.
Albeit Deodoro felt a long way off at 9.30am as Chris Froome held a brief pre-race audience with John Kerry, before hunkering down for the start of a gruelling and stunningly framed Olympic road event. There was just time to take in the slightly frantic start, as well as the utterly hopeless in-house commentator (“And … One of the Colombians has made a break! To … The water stand. Just keeping himself hydrated there!”). And so on to Deodoro.
Shooting, rugby and a raft of other middleweight sports are all posted out on this distant plane occupied by suburban housing and a knot of military bases, presumably with the idea of using the existing army range and replanting a deforested area nearby to offer a little legacy.
This sense of distance is perhaps lost in the spectacular TV coverage. The idea of a genuine city Olympics has always been appealing, with an easy traffic of spectators, a sense of a more coherent event. Against this the urge is always to build out, to find some benighted spot and use the vast injection of public funds as a kind of hit and hope regeneration tool. The end result can be a disparate, syndicated Games; or in this case a 120km round trek through that extended sprawl, across trains and taxis and metro and endless trudging between venue gates and stadium boulevards.
At central station Rio 2016 starts to feel for the first time like a genuinely South American, even rather local Olympics. Central is a lovely, breezy old-Brazil kind of station with a huge canopy roof and stalls selling pasties and deep-fried cheese balls. On the first Olympic Saturday it’s thronged with Cariocas heading off to the Games.
“I’m proud of the Olympics,” Sidney Linhares, a fiftysomething lifetime Carioca, says. “There have been a lot of problems and there will be some more. It’s a plague, the corruption around these things but I am very happy it’s here now.” Sidney is going to see the rugby. Is he a fan? “No. I don’t even know the rules. I’m going to see the place and be part of it.” A bit later I explain that in England rugby is sometimes seen as a sport played in posh schools, or by a certain class of person. “Oh yes, I see now,” he says. “This explains why the Argentinians always think they’re better than us.”
Finally the train rattles into its Olympic park stop, or rather the one before, the one in the actual park having been closed on the opening morning of the games for reasons that remain obscure. And so begins the long walk, a journey so picaresque that after a while the signs pointing towards the shooting start to feel almost sarcastic. A volunteer offers some directions, pronouncing the word “rugby” with a long, hesitant Brazilian “hhh” at the start, like a man speaking Venusian for the first time.
Finally we enter what feels like a vast rural fairground site. There’s the rugby zone, ranged around a deserted, sun‑bleached mini-arena with scattered inflatable posts and oval balls and a slightly mocking sign lying on its side that reads “TRY RUGBY!”. Still you press on, over bridges, down lanes, past a military outbuilding. After a while nobody seems to recognise the word “shooting”. I even try miming it, but after a while approaching heavily armed soldiers and pretending to shoot at them while making machine gun noises doesn’t feel like the way to go.
Not that anyone is anything less than helpful. It is one of the injustices of these Games that they should come so heavily trailed by stories about muggings and gunpoint heists. The majority experience is quite the opposite. Brazilians are hospitable people, often ready to smile and clap a fraternal hand on your shoulder.
This is a natural host nation, albeit weighed down at the point of delivery by its own baroque, interminable bureaucracy, that enduring fug and fuzz that clings to most organisational tasks. There will be moans in the media about the terrible food (this was solved at the shooting by not providing any) taps that don’t work and appalling bus timetables. But sometimes you do just have to go with it.
Certainly if you have any intention of watching the Olympic shooting. Look for the canyon, cross the stream. Eventually, when you’ve almost forgotten what you came for, when the journey itself has become your destination, the Olympic shooting will come to you.
The venue is a sunbaked strip of ranges, thronged with soldiers and the odd gaggle of spectators. Inside Thrasher has just won the first gold. She sits and talks to the press, looking small and neat and utterly elated, eyes wide, a teenager who just achieved the ultimate in her sport and for whom even a question on US gun control cannot dampen the mood. (“That’s completely separate from my sport.”) Next to her China’s Du Li, a 34-year-old veteran of three Games, looks devastated. The contrast is gripping, not to mention utterly, authentically Olympic.
From Froome to Thrasher in three hours and 20 minutes, the next step is south to the Olympic stadium at Engenhão de Dentro. Roadtesting Rio – it can be done, albeit perhaps not in a morning. The prognosis from here is good, though. These Games will work, the venues will function.
Brazil has put its back and its shredded public purse into providing a network that in its sheer scale, its slightly rickety joins, its engaging sense of friendliness really does feel from here like a very Rio kind of Games.
