It’s a right royal mess but Rio 2016 Olympics has a punchline: We are like this only

There’s nothing ostentatious at the Rio airport that pretends to welcome the world with fake smiles. In fact, Sao Paulo, a southern stopover, almost seems oblivious to what’s happening in the host city, going about its mad rush of domestic travellers like it’s just another weekend.

The Australians came and blew their lids at the first sighting of an under-prepared athletes’ village. But the Brazilians simply shrugged their shoulders, accepted it was under-cooked and went about the repairs. No offence-taking at the first world’s tantrum-throwing happened.

The Russians, meanwhile, are sitting at home and frothing in rage at the authorities’ blow-hot-blow-cold efforts at policing the doping menace that has kept some of them away from the Olympics. And golfers and tennis players have lined up neat, sundry reasons to avoid what they might have always intended to avoid — an out-of-season jaunt away from the calendar.

The Brazilians aren’t really losing sleep over that, either: the bevy of volunteers at the airport admitted how they didn’t hold back their giggles when Usain Bolt arrived, and a day later Rafael Nadal quietly fetched up.

This is sporting love in the time of Zika and most Brazilians would have you believe that they’ll gladly welcome the bold ones who come undeterred, but hold no grudges against those who fail to show up.

In its scale and general tenor, Rio 2016 is playing out like a sepia, staccato film of the Olympics of the 70s and 80s. For one, there’s no last-minute whitewashing or artificial landscaping of roads leading to the Games. And Brazil — one of the world’s most optimistic economies of the last two decades, now wracked by recession and political flux — isn’t bending over backwards to make some statement of their emergence. It’s a host country that’s willing to look ugly truths in the eye — the Zika virus, the Guanamara bay pollution, the political instability, the economic slump, protests, terror worries, doping dreads and the harsh assessment by complaining visitors.

“Yes, we could have been more prepared and turned out better. But we’ve done the best given the prevailing conditions,” said a middle-aged volunteer, Simone, a lifelong resident of Rio, adding that it will all be sorted once the Games start.

They are expecting communications to be erratic through the fortnight, and tech teams aren’t beating themselves up over tomato red English faces turning more crimson every minute with each passing botch-up. That the host nation speaks Portuguese seems to have calmed down everyone involved in a resigned-to-fate manner, or a “susegad” sort of way that tourists lull themselves into in Goa.

In sport, too, Brazil is reprising the 50s through 90s, taking this opportunity to celebrate Pele and Ayrton Senna, not Olympics celebrities exactly, but men unequivocally adored for what they did for sport and their country.
There’s “saudade”, a vague feeling of melancholic nostalgia for the joy the two (and Guga Kuerten, another man Brazilians can’t stop loving) brought to the nation — there are endless documentaries and grainy TV reruns on sports channels — even as beauty and the ugliness of life continue to wrestle each other like a pillow-fighting couple.

There’s acceptance that this is way bigger than the football World Cup — marked from the admission that this might not go as smooth. And there’s hope though that pain will pave the way for pretty memories as the Games unfold.Super model Giselle Bundchen is expected to be part of the opening ceremony and a leaked tidbit of her getting mugged, as part of a skit on Rio’s notorious streets, got panned despite its tangential attempt at heroising police who are expected to assure security to visitors. The Brits flung an actor playing the Queen at their opening do four years ago, to the strains of 007 and had her saved by James Bond. It takes getting used to — military police pointing guns out of grim-coloured vehicles and sirens of federal police beeping from street corners — but Brazil’s having a go.

It’s a country that expects the rancorous English-speaking world to go berserk, pointing to bad plumbing and dirty nooks of the Games Village. But given that very little about sport — not the institutional doping, not the Cold War-like West vs Russia doping slang match, not the gargantuan MNC sponsorships or the high-profile golf pullouts — has remained remotely amateurish to justify the principles of the Games, it’s just as well that Brazil puts its foot down and announces we-are-like-this-only.

Mayor Eduardo Paes has learnt his lessons from the pre-World Cup panning and is the first on the TV to announce problems, before the media blares them out. Brazilians are rejecting Olympics as a make-believe bubble of everything’s okay-ness.

Yes, there will be bad plumbing, poor broadband, head-splitting telecommunications and abysmal dirt in some corner of the athlete’s village — the rest of Rio and its celebrated favelas are like that. But there will also be song and dance. And no one does that better than the hip-swaying Cariocas. At best, the world can say a little prayer for them and hope to wing it. Like the Malawi athlete who was so delirious to have made it to Rio that he surprised the welcome ceremony delegates by showing his moves from the original African Samba.