There are more empty seats at the Rio Olympics than there would be at an IOC lecture on moral courage, given at the Etihad. It is traditional for any Olympic Games to be followed at a seemly distance by photo-stories detailing the slide into disuse of the various eye-wateringly expensive venues in the host city. In the case of Rio this seems to be happening concurrently, live on air alongside the marquee track and field events.
Banks of empty seats are visible at every venue for every event. Even strategically placed TV cameras can’t disguise it, as they often do. As the opening session of the athletics competition began last Friday, there were more media than spectators in the stadium, giving it the flavour of a Test match relocated to Abu Dhabi or Dubai for security reasons.
Whose fault is this? Contrary to the title of a standout movie even among Michael Caine’s remarkable 1980s oeuvre, I cannot Blame It On Rio. (Reminder: what a motion picture). Call me old fashioned, call me off-brand, but I still think of “Rio” as a city of more than six million people, huge numbers of them destitute, rather than an Olympic organising committee. The latter is responsible, the IOC – as the old hands in all this – more so. Its profiteering mega-event has never looked more distasteful or exploitative.
Any pre-Games suggestion that you simply could buy in Rio’s fabled “carnival atmosphere” has been proved wrong as never before, and organisers do not even appear to be able to make good on a wan promise to open the empty seats up to schoolchildren. Can tickets for Rio Olympics literally not be given away? It is unclear, but seems to be the case. The problem is variously denied, ignored, described as one of VIPs not turning up because of security or refreshment delays, or only turning up for one event in a long session. Most recently, the organising committee had a new excuse, saying that a lot of people were buying tickets but only using them to have a look around the Olympic Park, leaving before they’d seen any sport. (If you’re near a TV camera, do a WTF-tinged sideways glance at it now.)
A colleague over in Rio describes local bars with TVs all pointedly tuned out of the Olympics, unless it is for Brazil’s participation in the football tournament. Which principled stand I admire hugely. In their city, the varying degrees of scandal that attend every major modern sporting event could not be more infuriatingly obvious. The sporting industrial complex isn’t pretty at the best of times in booming first world locations. In Rio it plays out like a particularly hallucinogenic question in Family Fortunes. We asked 100 people in Rio to name something they wanted, to which the answers were obviously things like “sanitation” and “food”, but the imbecilic contestant hazards: “A canoe slalom venue?” The recherché nature of many Olympic sports and the specific facilities they demand read like especially vicious satires on late-stage capitalism when you consider the appalling deprivation so nearby.
For my own part, to survey the future white elephants deserted even during competition is to be slightly reminded of being on the most recent general election trail, where (aside from the SNP) the major parties shunned contact with the real public in favour of “rallies” in sanitised, non-public spaces like business parks, or closed factory floors. It all felt like a pseudo-event – something that would not happen were the TV cameras not there.
As the vast, vast majority of humans who don’t travel to World Cups or the Olympics, but watch them on TV, will always tell you: these things could really be happening anywhere. Apart from the gorgeous sweeping camera shots of the various cities used to frame coverage, what is local about the Olympics any more? Certainly not the audience.
The obvious solution would be so detrimental to the real business of the Olympics – money-grubbing – that it is never arrived at. Yet the Olympics are in this age permanently dysfunctional on the road. There is no decent or realistic moral argument for not permanently homing the summer Games in Greece (and the winter ones somewhere sensationally rich and alpine). The winners in this would include the Greeks, and all the future non-host cities who would save billions. The viewing public would barely notice.
Alas, the major losers in this arrangement are an all-powerful cabal. They include the zero-tax IOC, local politicians/presidents of varying degrees of corruption and megalomania, who use the Olympics to clamber inside the dictatorship simulator and be the version of their country they’d be if they weren’t repressed by quotidian encumbrances such as a constitution (traditionally overridden for a Games). Or, indeed, who use them as the curtain-raiser to annexing the Crimea.
Also on the list: construction firms and their opaque contract inducements, and the global class of corrupt officials who use these five-star hospitality events to do their ghastly business. Do recall that a large amount of damning FBI evidence in their case against Fifa was recorded with the aid of a wired-up key fob, which their informer Chuck Blazer was ordered to leave on the table in his various meetings during the London Games in 2012.
Will we ever say goodbye to this version of Olympic sport? It seems wildly unlikely, though in a sane universe – not this one, then – Rio has done more than any previous Games to make it an imperative.
