The Olympic flag was raised over Rio on Monday for the first time, capping a dreamlike weekend and awakening the city to the realities of the massive challenges that must be met before hosting the 2016 games.
Besides building 15 new venues, authorities are planning to extend a subway line eight miles through jungly peaks covered with hillside slums and must create a speedy bus system specially designed to shuttle tens of thousands of people an hour between the four Olympic zones.
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The sheer scope of the plan stunned taxi driver Joao Alves, stuck in traffic near Copacabana beach, known as much here for its traffic jams as it is for tiny bikinis and bronzed bodies.
Although Alves envisions years of irritating construction, he was enthused that Brazilian leaders who frequently promise improvements but rarely follow through must deliver this time.
“The amount of projects they’re talking about — every Carioca is going to feel the pain,” Alves said, using the nickname for Rio natives. “But the world is watching and will demand that our leaders do what they’ve said they will.”
Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said on his morning radio program Monday that “we’re investing for our nation” and that improvements in the overall transportation system would lead to an improved quality of life for the city’s people.
But 27-year-old Silvio Gama, who resides in the Cantagalo slum in Copacabana, said he didn’t believe that. Hawking candy bars and other snacks from a two-wheeled homemade cart on a beachside street, he said the money being spent on the Olympics was unlikely to trickle down to the rest of society.
“We need hospitals and decent homes, not sports stadiums,” Gama said. “The plan they have now will make improvements for one part of Rio’s society, but will do nothing for the poor. Their plan will hide the face of Rio.”
Of the $14.4 billion plan that Rio presented to host the games, some $11.5 billion will be spent on building or upgrading infrastructure. And a study by Brazil’s sports ministry said the games are expected to create 120,000 jobs each year across Brazil until 2016, plus 130,000 jobs per year the following 10 years.
The enormous Maracana football stadium and its surrounding neighborhood will be refurbished for the 2014 World Cup and will serve as the site of the Olympics opening and closing ceremonies, as well as the soccer competition.
Of the 34 venues to be used for the games, 19 already exist, including the recently completed Joao Havelange Olympic Stadium where track and field events will take place. Other buildings already in place will host sports such as basketball, track cycling and aquatics.
Of the 15 remaining venues that must be built, four will be temporary, and the rest will be used for future events.
Rio’s four Olympic zones will be spread out across the city and separated by mountainous terrain, site of the massive slums and most of the city’s notorious violence. Finding transportation solutions that can safely get people between the Olympic zones is considered a key challenge.
The city plans to shuttle athletes and spectators between venues using high-capacity “bus rapid transit” — or BRT — systems that will include dedicated lanes and roads that will be heavily policed. Rio officials, who say their system will move 76,500 passengers per hour, are copying what is considered the most efficient BRT, located in Bogota, Colombia.
Rio also is working to complete an extension of its metro train line that would link Barra, the zone where the Olympic village will be located, with the Copacabana area, site of most of the city’s hotels and where beach volleyball, long-distance swimming and triathlon will be staged.
Construction of the train line was not promised in Rio’s Olympic plan, and if it cannot be completed another BRT line will be used in its place, officials have said.
