Word: rios
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Chicago learns its Olympic fate on Oct. 2, when members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) meet in Copenhagen to award the 2016 Games. Madrid, Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo are the other contenders, and boosters say the Second City has a fighting chance. First, it offers a compact proposal: about 90% of the athletes would compete within a 15-minute drive of the proposed Olympic Village site, not far from Chicago's downtown. Many events would take place in city parks, and most new facilities - including the 80,000-seat Olympic Stadium, scheduled for the South Side's Washington...
...have its army massacre hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators 10 days before the opening ceremonies. The bar was set much higher for Latin America after that, meaning that a country would have to persuade the IOC that it could be a showcase for development as well as decathletes. (Can Rio handle the Olympics...
Brazil is widely regarded as the first Latin country to get there, and the IOC's selection is as much an endorsement of that achievement as it is of Rio's $14 billion bid to hold the games. The Nobel literature committee awarded Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez its prize in 1982 in part to affirm the global influence of Latin America's magical realist tradition. Now, giving Rio the Olympics sends a strong signal to the rest of the developing world that the Brazilian model - the post-ideological mix of orthodox market economics and progressive...
...that Brazil still doesn't have epic development problems to fix. Rampant corruption, violent crime, abysmal education and inadequate infrastructure are all urgent issues that Rio and Brazil alike have to address during the next seven years. Even Copacabana revelers like Gomes remember the holes in Rio's efforts when it hosted the Pan-American Games in 2007. "They didn't do all they said we would do and a lot of what they did do was left to rot after the games ended," she says, adding, "I think the elite will benefit from this more than most." Says Sotero...
...choosing Rio, in fact, the IOC is saying that, after the committee got burned 40 years ago by the Mexico tragedy, it's confident Brazil has matured enough to solve its headaches or at least keep them from adversely affecting the Olympics. Barack Obama reminded the IOC that Chicago is the "city that works." But Chicago lost out in large part because Lula could argue that, in Brazil, Latin America finally has a country that works. As a result, it's time to light the torch down South American...