Why the Olympic Mission to Rio Matters
**Michael Pirrie, Executive Advisor for the London 2012 Olympic Games Organising Committee, who has assisted at seven Olympic Games, reviews the Rio 2016 Games and what Rio means for the Olympic Movement, sport, and future host cities.
If the Olympic Games has become the modern day equivalent of the moon landings with the world watching on in anticipation as something extraordinary unfolds, then the Rio 2016 Games was like a modern day lunar expedition to unchartered territory in the Olympic universe as the Games travelled to the South American continent for the first time.
There were many “Houston, We Have A Problem ” moments encountered on the way, and the journey to Rio was a rocky one, filled at times with foreboding that the Olympic brand could suffer damage upon entering Brazil’s financially, socially and politically charged atmosphere.
Fears escalated in the countdown to the Games that Rio’s landscape might collapse like sink holes under the weight of hosting planet Earth’s biggest peacetime project, and that athletes might require space suit like protection against hazardous local conditions including disease, pollution, violence and unstable infrastructure that could endanger life and threaten elite sporting activity.
Indeed, it momentarily seemed the Olympic Movement’s starship may have landed on the dark side of the moon as images of giant digital bugs stretching across a lunar like surface filled television and online screens of all shapes and sizes as the first scenes from the Opening Ceremony emerged, bringing the Olympic Games to life – Games that in turn would also breathe new life into Rio and the global community of sport.
Rio defied the critics and delivered riveting Games; Games that may not have always been perfect, but which had enormous heart and soul, and engaged and energized cities and communities around the world like rarely before.
Rio’s Olympiad was not for Games purists, and fluctuated often between trouble and triumph.
The Rio Games often went against conventions and expectations built up from previous Olympics that had rotated for decades between Europe and North America and more recently regions of Asia.
But Rio showed the value and importance of taking the Olympic flagship to new territories.
These were Games for and of our times – Games that reflected the fragility of our planet in so many ways, but in these troubling times, the Olympic Games in Rio also revealed the capacity of the human spirit to create, innovate and overcome. Take a bow Rio.
Rio delivered against all expectations, providing a series of Olympic moments that further enriched the mythology of the Games as the greatest show on Earth.
Olympic moments go beyond sport and transcend sport. These are moments that only seem to happen at the Olympic Games, and which highlight the capacity of sport to inspire and unite a city, country and the wider world.
Rarely has an Olympic moment meant so much to a host nation as Neymar’s last gasp penalty goal against Germany in the final of the Olympic football competition, the sport and the medal that meant the most to the host nation.
This was a rare moment of pride in the recent troubled history of this football obsessed host nation. Neymar’s single striking of a football sent 200 million Brazilians into instant ecstasy and happiness.
This was an Olympic moment that united Brazil as news of the victory reached out across the entire nation, from gleaming high rise luxury penthouse apartments to the impoverished slums and remote villages and regions of the Amazon.
This modern day football miracle brought atonement for the football proud country after its humiliating and haunting loss to Germany 2 years ago during Brazil’s own Fifa World Cup competition.
This was a moment of sporting salvation and redemption delivered from heaven which prompted an outpouring of joy across Brazil – a moment that in and of itself seemed to almost justify the enormous effort of bringing the Olympic Games to Brazil, such was the importance of Neymar’s goal in the contemporary life of a nation that defines itself through football.
The Rio Games had electrifying sport and athletes across the broad spectrum of Olympic competition, led by two of the movement’s greatest legends Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps who resembled Marvel Super Heroes and produced many electrifying moments.
The Rio Games showed that sport is still one of the most inclusive and unifying forms of human expression and activity on the planet; that the Olympic Games is still sport’s ultimate showcase.
If the Olympic Games is a human opera of life in the pursuit of dreams and achievement, Rio staged one of the grandest symphonies of sport and the human spirit ever, as athletes delivered almost perfect performances under enormous pressure and expectation.
The Rio Games took the world-wide interest in sport to new heights. Many of storylines from the Games seemed so unlikely that they could have been dreamt up by a team of sports science fiction writers – until, that is, a string of almost impossible scenarios materialised on Rio’s playing fields, manifested in performances of electrifying speed, endurance, strength, resilience, movement and imagination – including a fairytale ending for Bolt, who said good bye with the Triple Treble or Triple Triple, something so unlikely that there was even confusion about how to describe what he had achieved.
Rio’s real life scripts also included athletes who had overcome cancer, awoken from comas; recovered from severe spinal injuries or emotional breakdown, and who moved us with stirring performances that pointed to new horizons and new possibilities for progress and purpose in these dark times.
Rio was like a live non-stop action, romance movie full of twists and turns, and some film noir as well. Never has the so-called Olympic Family and sport been so broad and so diverse as in Brazil.
The Games had everything from athlete twins, triplets, gold medal winning brothers, married and same sex couples, engagement proposals, doping, missing persons and buses, fake hold ups and fabricated, phoney statements to police; passport seizures, and even the dawn hotel arrest of a leading IOC official – almost as much action behind the scenes as in the venues.
Rio made for compelling viewing and constant conversation, on line and in restaurants, homes, offices, school classrooms and playgrounds, building sites, off shore oil rigs, on trams and in subways, at farmers markets, and at supermarket check outs, in doctors waiting rooms, on running machines and in sports clubs and community centres around the world.
More than any recent, Games Rio highlighted the unique character of the Olympics as a sporting event that is about more than sport.
Rio was also about the human condition and it made a statement about the condition of the world and society at large as reflected through the struggles of the host city against terrorism, extreme social inequality, environmental breakdown, corruption and other threats faced also much closer to home as well in many of the Olympic nations competing in Rio.
Along with the athletes, Rio’s residents were the heroes of the Games, adjusting and adapting to change in their communities as Rio was reconfigured and reimagined as an Olympic host and as a city of the future amidst a series of economic, social, political and public health threats such as the Zika virus that had caused severe birth defects in many babies, and battered the lives but not the spirit of residents who put aside these far more immediate and urgent concerns to welcome the world to their city and volunteer for Games duties.
Sport seemed to rule the world during the Rio Games as Olympic news went viral, newspapers printed special editions and television constantly replayed Olympic highlights.
“I’m obsessed with the Olympics,” wrote one follower on Facebook, reflecting the views of millions of other Olympic fans and followers. ” 14 of my last 15 posts have been about the Olympics. I’m currently camped out at my friends house mostly so I can watch the Olympics undisturbed …but there’s more to it than just national pride and feel-good moments,” the Olympic enthusiast continued.
“Again and again, as I sit eating popcorn for dinner, I watch these incredible athletes take the 30 seconds they’ll never have on camera again and use them to praise the Lord,” she said, referring to the religious zeal she had observed around these Games where athletes regularly crossed themselves in silent prayer in preparation for the biggest moments of their lives, from first time Olympians to Usain Bolt.
Above all, the athletes at the Rio Games provided hope, and showed that hope could be found in the most unlikely of places, including the favelas. In what could make been an opening scene from a sequel to Fernando Meirelles’s City of God movie about Rio’s favelas, the very first gold medal of the Olympic Games in Brazil was won by Rafaela Silva, who grew up in Rio in one of the slums depicted in the ‘City of God’ movie, just a few miles from where Silva won her gold medal – another Olympic Only Moment.
So too, the selfie of a young North Korean female gymnast united with a young female gymnast, from South Kore, a powerful next generation human legacy from the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games when the North and South Korean teams entered the Olympic stadium together under the same flag. Another Olympic moment.
Rio’s new transport systems, connections, urban infrastructure, new port and new sports venues built for the Games and longer term future of Rio also provide hope – hope that this much needed new infrastructure will bring new business and new opportunities, and underpin economic recovery in the years ahead.
Hope on the ground in Rio initially however had been hard to find before the Games, although doubt and uncertainty now seem to be a permanent fixture at every pre-Games location, including two of the most successful Games of modern times, London 2012 and Sydney 2000 – indeed popular travel writer Bill Bryson observed that “it is literally not possible to name a catastrophic contingency, short of asteroid impact or nuclear attack, that hasn’t been mooted and exhaustively analysed” in Australia’s press in the lead up to the Sydney 2000 Games.
In a city where it seemed the Games were surviving on just a wing and a prayer, a model of the first biplane, invented by a Brazilian aviation designer, took flight from the Opening Ceremony stadium, taking spectators and global audiences on an uplifting journey across the Rio skyline, circling iconic beauty spots, including Christ the Redeemer, providing views that sent spirits soaring and reminded everyone of the settings and communities in the Rio valley below that had been so instrumental in bringing these Games to South America in the first place.
A record 208 nations and territories, including the first “national ” team of athlete refugees, including a Syrian swimmer who helped to save a sinking boat load of people from drowning, participated in Rio, and reminded us that the Olympic Games is still the single largest gathering of nations in the world – bigger than the United Nations ; a reminder also of the Olympic Movement’s wider focus on peaceful development and change through sport, helping perhaps to better understand the IOC Executive Board’s pre-Rio decision not to ban Russia entirely from the Games for doping violations, placing a greater emphasis instead on sports diplomacy and participation rather than international humiliation and condemnation.
The storm clouds over the Rio Games began to part as the teams ventured to the venues, evoking a powerful sense of history as Olympic competition commenced for the first time on the continent, heralding new era in world sport .
The start of competition also lifted the protective seal wrapped around the Rio 2016 Games laboratory where the latest Olympic extravaganza had been planned over seven long years and a new and uplifting view of the Games emerged.
The world was fascinated and captivated by what it saw inside Rio’s Olympic venues as the skills of the best athletes in the sporting universe came into shaper focus; athletes from all backgrounds and cultures, talented and skilled in ways that would leave leading players in the world’s premier sporting leagues struggling to keep up.
The athletes – including a multitude of world record holders, knowing they would forever be judged by their Olympic achievements – performed at awe inspiring levels delivering a cavalcade of new world and Olympic records and personal bests, almost always with humility, grace, humour and goodwill whatever their fate or outcome.
Pioneering Olympic nations such as the United States and Australia established themselves quickly on the medal table, along with a line up of other traditional nations, including Great Britain, which, building on the momentum from the London 2012 Games finished second and emerged as a new sporting power, while first time medal winners including Fiji and Singapore created their own Olympic history.
Other nations secured hard won medals in new sports for the first time, often through the efforts of their female athletes whose achievements brought new interest and attention to their countries and cultures, reinforcing IOC President Thomas Bach’s strong focus on the increasing role of sport in modern society.
LESSONS FROM RIO
The Rio Olympic Games were indeed challenging but successful – and unstoppable – despite the many issues. The stunningly beautiful natural settings and quality of the sport and the athletes that will define these Games, however, also softened the impact of difficulties at the Games, and highlighted the potential vulnerability of major international sporting events and infrastructure projects in the current period of prolonged global and economic uncertainty and terrorism.
While Rio’s staff and food shortages, security lapses, judging inconsistencies, transport gaps, empty seats, ticketing scams and other issues may prompt debate about the location of future Olympic Games in regions of the world in cities beyond the traditional comfort zones of Europe, North America and Asia, many of the problems encountered in Rio have also been experienced before at previous Games hosted in many of the world’s most advanced cities, but did not seem so entrenched or constant as in Rio.
And although many of the difficulties experienced in Rio were clearly the result of the ” state of public calamity” declared during planning and preparations for the Games, Rio also suffered at times from poor organisational decision-making procedures and systems amongst the organising stakeholders.
Like the Apollo moon missions and more recent international space station expeditions, the survival and success of the Rio Games relied on a massive teamwork operation between Rio and Olympic and IOC Games experts, led by IOC President Bach involving key IOC colleagues and senior staff, including Christophe Dubi, John Coates and many others.
The Olympic Games model was able to withstand the many pressures experienced in Rio including the extensive budget cuts, providing a new, no frills version of the Games that, with some fine tuning – including more reliable streams of revenue for organising committees that are not so dependent ticket sales, although this should not be such a challenge in Tokyo which will benefit greatly from the introduction of new sports at the 2020 Games, especially baseball and softball, great national sports in Japan – should be able to sustain the Games against further adverse conditions in future host cities.
As well as street crime, the Rio Games also focused attention on crimes against sport, with the success of track and field in Rio highlighting the importance of ongoing reforms in the fight against doping led by IAAF President Seb Coe in the countdown to the world’s next biggest sporting event, the world athletics championships to be held in London next year, and the need for further action by WADA and the IOC to combat doping more effectively in wake of extensive Russian government sponsored and supported doping activity, revealed in the pre Rio Games McLaren Report.
CONCLUSION
Rio reminds us that while it is not realistic to expect the Olympic Games to solve all our social ills, sport can point to what is important – on and off the sporting fields. Above all, in a world of terrorism, war, obesity epidemics, economic decline and urban and environmental crisis, Rio showed that sport matters. A lot.
The Rio Olympics was the second half of the hardest double act in world sport – successive and successful delivery of the Football World Cup followed by the Olympic Games. The degree of difficulty in landing the Olympic spaceship in Rio on a surface full of major political, social and financial barriers was almost unprecedented, but with the whole world watching, Rio delivered when it mattered most. Mission accomplished. Bravo Rio. Bravo.
**Michael Pirrie is an international communications and media relations strategy advisor and Olympic commentator who led the successful international media campaign for the London 2012 Olympic Games bid against New York, Paris, Moscow and Madrid.
Michael’s 
