South America’s first Olympic Games are over, and they were good enough.
Rio’s lush scenery provided a memorable backdrop. Security glitches and long lines improved as the Games proceeded. A new subway line ran practically glitch-free. A men’s soccer gold medal for the hosts went a ways toward reclaiming the spotlight from U.S. swimmer Ryan Lochte’s robbery hoax.
More important, the 2016 Olympics weren’t the epic disaster many had feared. Water pollution didn’t ruin the sailing competition, hastily built infrastructure didn’t collapse and haphazard security preparations didn’t enable a terrorist attack. Most visitors had a splendid time.
Rio’s next challenge—to avoid backsliding into the decadence that has defined the city since Brazil moved its capital to Brasília in the early 1960s—may prove more daunting.
Brazil is mired in its worst recession in generations, a crisis from which Rio had been partly sheltered as public officials worked to ensure a successful Games. Venue construction provided thousands of jobs. Legions of national guardsmen and military forces helped secure the streets. When Rio’s governor declared a fiscal calamity in June, the state promptly received a federal bailout earmarked for Olympic commitments.
But for Cariocas, as Rio residents call themselves, the party is over. Violent crime is rising after years of decline.The state unemployment rate jumped to 11.4% in the second quarter, exceeding the national average for the first time since 2012. Oil prices, the lifeblood of the state budget, remain below $50 a barrel. Rio’s 2.9-billion-real ($906 million) bailout won’t go far against a 20-billion-real deficit that caused hospitals to reduce capacity, schools to close and police to threaten to strike this year.
“The Cariocas next week, they’ll go back to polluted waters, dirty beaches, bus holdups, bank robberies and the stuff they have been living with for quite a long time,” said Riordan Roett, director of the Latin American Studies program at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. “Rio is kind of an ornament, a lovely ornament, but it doesn’t have any money.”
The self-proclaimed Marvelous City has long juggled multiple maladies. Contradiction—wealth and beauty versus poverty and tragedy—has always been central to Rio’s identity.
But in 2009, when this year’s Olympic host was chosen over Chicago, and Brazil was cruising through the global recession flush with commodity windfalls, it seemed as though Rio had a chance to finally live up to its nickname. The Olympics, Cariocas hoped, would finally justify their vanity.
The city has made great strides since its 1990s nadir. Rio’s murder rate has fallen 75% since 1994, to a level only slightly higher than Chicago’s. In dozens of favelas once controlled by drug gangs, police have established a full-time presence in hopes of better integrating the communities into the city.
Authorities have also poured billions of dollars into public-transportation projects that could ease chronic gridlock, crediting the Olympics for giving them a hard deadline.
Daniel Alencar, a brand strategist at FutureBrand in São Paulo, believes the Olympics could make a difference in improving Rio’s image. But that depends on whether the city can hold on to its recent advances.
“Perceptions of Brazil are almost like an electrocardiogram,” Mr. Alencar said. “What we need to do is not let this peak be followed by a valley. We need to build upon the legacy…so that two months or six months from now, negative news doesn’t overshadow all the positive news the city has had.”
To be sure, the Olympic limelight brought many of Rio’s flaws into relief. Transportation was often a headache. Swimming pools turned green. A subpar dining scene was unmasked. Even with a record security presence of 85,000 agents, shootouts raged in favelas, and several Olympic team members were mugged.
Critics say the Games may have encouraged Rio’s old habit of glossing over its defects to throw a party.
Many of the promises the city delivered for the Games—the $3 billion subway line, a new airport terminal, a renovated marina for sailing competitions—most directly benefit tourists and upper-class residents. After seven years of vowing to fund itself with private money, the Rio 2016 organizing committee accepted an emergency donation from taxpayers when the Games were in full swing.
The commitments Rio fell short on—sewage treatment and cleanups of the Guanabara Bay and other waterways—would have reaped long-term returns for a much broader swath of society.
Rio did just enough to pull off a successful Olympics. It didn’t undergo the profound transformation that local politicians and the International Olympic Committee advertised.
Most Olympic hosts don’t. Few—most famously Los Angeles in 1984—turn a profit from the event.
Mayor Eduardo Paes likes to compare his city to Barcelona, which used its 1992 Games to initiate a revitalization that turned it into a major tourist destination.
But for Rio to follow in Barcelona’s footsteps, it will have to make further improvements in areas like public safety, urban mobility and sewage treatment, said Thomas Trebat, a longtime Latin America economist who now works for Columbia Global Centers in Rio. “The only reason Barcelona transformed itself was that it kept investing after the Olympics.”