Column | Why are Hong Kong’s Olympic athletes going to be treated like prisoners in Rio?
Decision not to let team leave the athletes’ village is embarrassing
It’s a given of every Olympics news cycle that the build-up to the event will be dominated by warnings that the host city won’t be ready, disaster is on the way and even the sky is a 50-50 chance to collapse.
We saw it two years ago ahead of the Winter Olympics in Sochi and four years ago before London. Once the sporting action gets underway, these soothsayings of doom are quietly forgotten about, until a year or so before the next one when they crank into motion once more.
This is despite the fact that one of the few, if not the only, Games not to have been ready was Antwerp 1920, when the stadium wasn’t finished and athletes slept on fold-out cots in an abandoned school; they had a pretty good excuse given the country’s infrastructure and economy was still devastated from World War One.
This time though, less than a month away from the opening ceremony at the Maracana in Rio de Janeiro, the prophecies do seem to have a little more weight than usual.
Do a Google News search for ‘Rio Olympics’ and you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d typed Book of Revelation by mistake, with a beast with seven heads and 10 horns about to rise from the hideously polluted waters of Guanabara Bay. One of the top links this week was Gawker’s summary of the issues, titled ‘All the Reasons the Rio Olympics are F*****’
If you haven’t been paying attention, highlights include: the Zika virus, human body parts washing up on Copacabana beach, the state being forced to declare “financial disaster” to get a federal bailout, police holding up banners declaring ‘Welcome to Hell’ at the airport, murders and robberies on the rise, antibiotic-resistant super-bacteria in the water where the sailing will take place, and the rowers literally being sent up s*** creek (but with paddles) due to massive amounts of human faeces in Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon.
