| Rio has given all it can for these Olympics; the IOC owes something back |
| By Sally Jenkins |
| RIO DE JANEIRO — You can see what a triumph the Rio Olympics might be, as you laze beneath a Jucara palm and stare sleepified across the city's opal-tinted beaches, or traverse the ruined old streets that still show the faint facades of empire. There is a great world capital and host city lurking here under the tired brown fronds, if Brazil only could dig out of this economy and survive this albatross. The Olympics should build Rio up, not drive it down. The Games have stressed a city already under stress; you can see that in the stoic faces waiting for the groaning city buses that aren't permitted in the dedicated lanes, and the angry protests that followed the torch. But by the eve of the Opening Ceremonies, it was also plain what a grand if teetering metropolis this is, with its eras stacked one top of another: imperial, colonial, belle epoch, and modern. The possibility that Rio de Janeiro bought into nine years ago is epitomized by the new shimmering winged Museu do Amanha, the "museum of Tomorrow" at the Porto Maravilha, where an old vice-ridden dock has become a splendid signature waterfront akin to Sydney or San Francisco, and where boys jump into murky Guanabara Bay heedless of the viral count. The potential cost is in those wedged favelas, the corrugated tin and brick walls stained with the flared colors of graffiti, and the shouts of people wondering why $12 billion has been spent on white winged extensions into the future, and stadiums an hour outside of town, instead of jobs, sewers and water. |
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