Here it is then: the Games to end all Games. As Rio 2016 prepares to emerge from the waters, blowing the sweetcorn from its nostrils, smearing the crud from its goggles, panting for its prescription inhaler, it is easy to forget the sense of something genuinely profound and transformative in the air seven years ago when Rio was awarded these games at a starry ceremony in Copenhagen.
Barack Obama, there to back Chicago’s bid, had left before the final vote. Instead the plinth was dominated by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s own great modernising president in the full flush of his boom‑era powers, there to talk about shifting global tides, the rise of the new world, and above all his own (pre-corruption scandal, obviously) honesty and clarity.
Pelé could be seen weeping openly in the victory huddle. Lula himself wept during and after his own speech, and later revealed he had awoken several times in the night in order to weep some more. Only João Havelange didn’t cry, but then Havelange isn’t really given to such displays, preferring instead the cold, hard stare of a man who has already sold the world at least twice, who swims three miles every morning in his own squirrels’‑milk infinity pool while dressed in a solid gold bowler hat, and who is right now weighing up whether to have you filleted and made into a set of luggage.
Either way, Rio 2016 was always meant to be something special. And so it has turned out to be: the most unloved, most compromised, most gleefully derided Games yet. It is a pre-backlash pegged out around three main givens.
First, that Brazil itself is an undesirable place: both the corruption capital of the sporting world, honey pot of the helicopter and buffet-table classes; and a place of near-constant diarrhoea-caked street crime, where car‑jacking mosquitoes roam the beachfront and meth-crazed corrupt administrators rip infrastructure contracts from the bumbags of cowering tourists.
Second, the Olympics itself is no longer a fit place for stern, white-shorted men to potter about collapsing at the end of the marathon but is instead, like pretty much everything else in the world, a matrix of unceasing corporate greed.
Third, and perhaps most clinchingly, there is the I-can’t-believe-what-I’m-seeing dynamic whereby the feats of each athlete engaged in the murderous four-yearly training cycle must be disregarded because, well, drugs, swilled vermouth, Ivan Drago, secret lab entrances and all the rest.
At the end of which it is tempting to imagine that the story ends here, that these Olympics have already failed, the Games themselves reduced to a kind of regal plague ship unwanted in any port. Every movement tends towards entropy. The Olympics, it seems, has reached a stop, propellors clogged in the gleaming effluent of Guanabara Bay.
And yet reports of the death of Rio 2016 tend to overlook two things. First, that even the wretched shemozzle over doping sanctions cannot detract from the thrillingly high level of competition in store. And second, that rather than ruined, spoilt, unwatchable and all the rest, these Games already look utterly fascinating, utterly epic and entirely human. Personally I’m going to be glued to every second.
It isn’t hard to see how Brazil can seem a frightening or infuriating host. Even to those who know it well it can be a charmingly ludicrous place, sustained by a kind of running in-joke of wasted wealth, of endless frittered and feckless tomorrows. Even Rio’s own spanking new Museum Of Tomorrow sounds like a classic Brazilian joke. The whole place is one big museum of tomorrow, all those new dawns stacked up and mouldering away.
Brazil can be a disturbing country. At the last World Cup the police issued a security pamphlet advising tourists “not to scream” when being mugged, as this will only aggravate the criminals. Rather than mend the roads, the rich buy helicopters, while the middle-classes drive bullet-proof cars.
Plus of course Brazil is the perfect Big Sport host nation, spiritual home of these vast sporting Death Stars that orbit the globe training their destructor beams, hoovering up the wheat fields, scattering the outhouses. Not only did Brazil help introduce its own very Brazilian “jeitinho-culture” corruption to Fifa, before producing the most wasteful World Cup ever conceived. It is also a natural home of the overclass, a nation that never recovered from having the entire Portuguese royal court plonked down in Rio 200 years ago to cleanse the Rio slums and bankrupt the nation building grandiose white elephants, divvying up the country between a cast of dimwit heirs and earls.
You get the hosts you deserve. You also get the Games. The hand-wringing over the corruption of the Olympic ideal ignores the fact that sport has never existed in a vacuum. When has this ancient, narcissistic Zeus-worshipping fiesta, part military display, part sensual debauch, ever been cloudless, sealed, pristine or whatever it is we want it to be?
Instead the post-war Olympics have been defined by the Cold War era, when the Games entwined itself around the East v West end-of-days dynamic, and by the rampant greed and opportunism of its commercial model, a by-product of which, sustained chemical cheating, is threatening to corrode its cogs and wheels and bring the whole thing screeching to a halt. Hubris, greed, vaulting ambition, a mad hatter’s tea party of competing interests: meet Brazil, land of corruption and entrenched elites. Sound familiar? Even slightly?
And yet sport always offers some glimmer of redemption. Beyond all this murk and human weakness there will be the usual moments of beauty. The Olympics may be a mess, a heist, a circus of insincerity. But there is still something gloriously pure in here. The best parts will still happen. From the para-athletes – and by the way: don’t check the doping stats here – pushing themselves to extraordinary limits, to the elite track and field talent out there floating high above the earth producing strange and unprecedented feats of human ultimacy.
To whinge and whine about the frazzled edges, the evil that men do, seems utterly pointless. The game is rigged wherever you look. All human civilisation comes muddled and fuzzed and played at a slant, a jungle of interests and hoarded power from which, if we’re lucky, a few moments of grace can still emerge.
