As you probably know this year summer Olympic games will take place in Rio de Janeiro. There is going to be multiple venues reserved for the Olympics (Barra, Deodoro, Maracana, Copacabana and other football cities through Brasil). In the first post I little bit talked about my volunteering at Olympics. I am not allowed to describe the details but I hopefully may say that the process started in November 2014 and final confirmation came somewhere around April 2016. Since then I have been putting my masterplan together and here I am.

In todays post I want to cover two things: Olympics has divided Brasil society same as Brexit has with the British one (FTW UK?), there are people who hugely support the Olympics and people who are totally against. I will try to explain it based on the information I have from the locals. Second will be hopefully beautiful trip to the Barra Olympic Park and Olympic Village.

Controversy of Olympics

Please keep in mind that the information provided here are only my impression based on the conversations with locals and they are not confirmed by second source as a proper reporter should do. So try to make your own picture by digging deeper.

In short Olympics should be celebration of humanity and acceptation of diversity. If you don’t accept this idea you should probably stop reading right HERE. If we look at it from more practical view we see that lots of construction, organization, coordination, time and money are needed for putting such an event together. Now we are getting to the core. There is lots of venues which are constructed from the scratch, new BRT (spine bus network) stations are constructed, new metro stations are build and also other facilites (hotels) to be able to serve needs of Olympics. This may look really nice, plenty of new things is being to build and last (hopefully). If you put it together in general picture of Rio – Copacabana, Christo Redendor, Parties, Carneval it all looks pretty nice? But is it?

Rio is facing multiple political problems rooting in corruption. Also the construction of some Olympics venues is due to corruption. Millions are spent on construction and thousands people strugle in poor communities (favellas). Universities are on strike due to lack of money. Criminality is high. From the perspective of an average local the Olympics has no meaning and will only make things worse. For such a local it’s hard to imagine what may happen when tousands (or millions) people come to the already crowded city. Also for such a local the tickets for the events seems expensive and they see it as event for foreigns (gringos) and not for them.

Choosing a side in this controversy is really hard. I also haven’t decided yet. Lot of the information needs confirmation, but that leads us to other problem, that the media might not be objective about the situation. And we are stuck in endless circle.

From my perspective I can say those things are definately true. I see them all around me. The traffic is big, buses are crowded. My friend’s university has been on strike already for 3 months and the end is not near. Poor communities exist. My other friend got robbed two weeks ago. The construction on Olympics venues is still on going, as you will see from the pictures below.

It’s for us to decide which side to stand! … and I obviously forgot to add the risk of zika, dengue fever and other health risk, I saw also article about resistant bacteria on the beaches… but that’s totally different topic I don’t want to cover now.

Olympic Park Sightseeing

Now lets start something more positive! The trip around Olympic venue in Barra. It’s there, it’s almost finished and it’s beautiful. So enjoy our trip!