Weather
On Wednesday night Chris Mears and Jack Laugher won Britain’s first diving gold. They looked surprised, as anyone ought to when they have just beaten the Chinese at a form of gymnastics. But the conditions played into their hands. If British summer holidays prepare you for nothing else, it is jumping into a manky swimming pool in the pouring rain. Rio’s grey skies, perpetual drizzle and squally wind are the closest Team GB is likely to get to home weather. They should make hay while the sun isn’t shining.
In fact the people having the worst time with the conditions seem to be the BBC presenters, who have been muttering resentfully all week. If only they employed weather forecasters – cursory Googlers could also have done the job – they might have discovered that Rio de Janeiro is prone to the odd August drenching. During the rowing on Thursday, John Inverdale apologised for the sound conditions and explained that some of their equipment wasn’t working. In Inverdale’s case it might be more apt to apologise when the equipment is working.
Sexy time
It is now taken as read that Olympic villages are a stockpot of sexual tension, overflowing with free condoms and randy Scandinavian handball players. What’s different this time is the attention being drawn by the gay athletes. The Brazilian rugby player Isadora Cerullo received a proposal from her girlfriend on the pitch. Kate and Helen Richardson-Walsh, the British hockey players, are the first married gay couple to compete at the games. Not forgetting Tom Daley, abdominals glinting under the floodlights. Sensing the opportunity to show moral leadership, the Daily Mail reported that, while Laugher and Mears had hugged in celebration, their Chinese counterparts had settled for a “manly” pat on the back. Between the semi-nude grunting and shoving and hugging, it’s not as if the Olympics have hidden their homoeroticism under a bushel. But some argued that Nico Hines, a reporter for the Daily Beast, went too far when he logged into various dating apps – both gay and hetero – to scour the athletes’ village for possible suitors. He did not follow through, and said he explained who he was as soon as the question came up, but managed to out an athlete from Kazakhstan, a nation not renowned for its gay rights. Gay athletes, competing in record numbers, were not impressed. If there is any broader point to the Games jamboree, surely it’s as the ultimate expression of western soft power. These are our values: PE, McDonald’s and being able to sleep with whoever you want within five minutes, using your phone.
All in the detail
Before the Games, most of the gnashing of teeth was about whether the big stadiums would be ready in time. Nothing has collapsed, even if the mayor, Eduardo Paes, described the velodrome as “um trabalho desgraçado” (a wretched job). As the most beautiful setting for a city in the world, Rio was always going to look spectacular in wide-shot. But close-up there are little details that lend the spectacle a cheap feel. The green diving pool, with the tiles that look like they might at any moment crack off. The huge container ships behind the sailing route, as if the racers were oil crews grabbing time off from cleaning an engine. The little multicoloured trophies being handed out with the medals, like Google paperweights. The endless naff music. The little clown-car honk that goes off each time a rowing boat crosses the finish line. More than anything else these details were what London got right, from the signage all over the Tube to the foam-fingered volunteers to the wildflower landscaping around the paths.
Hyperbole, Hyperbore
“They make this look so easy,” said Matt Baker as the men’s gymnastics team went through their miraculous routines on Monday. Perhaps for Baker, who was a champion junior gymnast himself. But to some of us, sprawled on the sofa with mouths full of olives and rosé, it was still possible to think of simpler-looking activities than Kohei Uchimura’s horizontal bar routine.
One can hardly blame Baker for his enthusiasm. The Olympics are Christmas for commentators on minority sports, summoned from their niche satellite channels for a glorious fortnight of national primetime. You can hear them straining at the microphone, begging us to love fencing or canoeing. It’s all rather needy, and in some cases – looking at you, dressage – comes with a whiff of over-protestation. More grating is the jingoistic shrieking whenever a Brit comes within 100 yards of a medal. I blame that Icelandic pundit during the World Cup, who showed that losing your mind in the commentary box is a sure way to go viral. To be fair to him, Iceland’s performance in that tournament was cause for a high pitch of celebration. For Team GB it would have been appropriate 20 years ago, when only the boat with Steve Redgrave in it went anywhere near gold. Now that we are draped in medals of all colours, perhaps the commentary could be a bit more circumspect. Perhaps in future each pundit could be allocated one patriotic shriek per Games.
Heavenly bodies?
I thought gymnasts were meant to be elegant and lithe. Divers too, for that matter. Instead they all look like video-game characters who’ve been eating nothing but steak and fighting each other in the woods all winter. This is especially true of the American team, who combine their absurd physiques with crew cuts and lots of manly shouting. One of their number, Sam Mikulak, suggested that they would get more respect if they competed with their tops off and everyone could see how “yoked” they were. In a pre-dive interview, Tom Daley said it had been a conscious strategy to bulk up, to help him get through his routines with more power. Perhaps it is also a consequence of more money and professionalism in the sport. But it is hard not to think that social media have a part to play in all this. Male torsos have not been this objectified since ancient Greece: athletes’ Twitter and Instagram accounts are lovingly curated exhibitions of pecs and abs.
Sports
One sport that didn’t need any shrieking was the rugby sevens, whose debut was an unalloyed triumph. It is the perfect sport for the dilettante television watcher: fast, exciting and short. Not adjectives anyone is levelling at golf. The Olympics ought to be a platform for ascendant sports. Golf is a tired old game – white, male, stale and bad for the environment – dying on its feet. Contrast the sight of Fiji, blitzing Great Britain to win their nation’s first medal, with Justin Rose – one of the few multi-millionaire top golfers to bother with the flight to Brazil – arms aloft after his hole in one, ignoring the caddy coming in for a high-five. Red-buttoning between the two sports, it was not hard to see why middle-aged men are trading their putters for pelotons. In this context, Rio looks less like a showcase and more like the last-chance saloon. Perhaps someone will invent golf sevens in time for Tokyo.
Tickets
For those of us who remember the agony of buying tickets for London 2012, it has been particularly galling to see the thousands on thousands of empty seats on display. Predictably it is only their football team – straining for the Olympic victory that has eluded them until now – that truly grips the nation’s imagination. As ever, the entire country shuts down for two hours when the seleção is in action. One wonders how many Brazilians see the Olympics as a football tournament surrounded by a lot of unnecessary peripheral events.
For Jessica Ennis-Hill’s high jump on Friday and Almaz Ayana’s obliteration of the 10,000m world record, there were almost as many on the field as in the arena. Rio’s chief spokesman, Mario Andrada, took several days before conceding that the empty seats were “a problem”. It need not be an intractable problem. When empty seats were spotted in London, the army was drafted to plug the holes. If there is one thing Rio has no shortage of, it is soldiers and policemen who could use an afternoon off, particularly after the death of Hélio Vieira, the soldier shot dead after his GPS led him into a favela.
Still, perhaps we are not giving enough credit to the authorities. You could argue that Rio is cunningly stealing a march on its critics by turning its stadiums into deserted white elephants during the Games, rather than waiting until afterwards, like other host cities.
And yet…
Despite the weather, the empty stadiums, the falling-apart accommodation, the unbearable traffic, the reports of violence and of homeless people being evicted, the proven doping, the suspected doping, the monstrosity of the IOC, John Inverdale and every other issue collated under the #rioproblems hashtag, the show goes on. More than any recent Games, Rio reveals the Olympics for what they are: a titanic game of chicken with the human spirit. We are horribly biased: one plucky Ethiopian swimmer, one leaping Katarina Johnson-Thompson, or Mo Farah crossing the line with arms outstretched, is worth almost any amount of proximate shambles and disaster. Joy lingers longer in the blood than suspicion. When it is all weighed out, the question every nation has to answer is: do we feel good? One suspects the Brazilians might have a different answer from the British. Depending on how their football team does.
