Learning to love the Games

RIO DE JANEIRO - Rio is the first Olympics I have covered as a journalist, but just as for most people on the planet, the Games were a big part of growing up.

It certainly looked that way in early August when I waited alongside Cariocas -- the nickname for Rio residents -- to watch the Olympic torch relay arrive in the city.

I have to admit I was already feeling pretty jaded.

The torch relay was not invented by the ancient Greeks, as Olympic authorities might like us to believe, but the Nazis in the 1936 Berlin Games. Now for three months this over-the-top affair had been snaking expensively around the vast country, regularly getting in trouble.

Runners had fallen over. Guards accompanying the runners had run each other over. Violent protesters clashed with violent police. A rare captive jaguar was brought to greet the torch, then shot dead on trying to escape. Numerous people tried throwing water over the supposedly sacred flame.

Nothing, though, could have prepared me for the grotesque cavalcade that finally lumbered down that Rio street.

The first thing appearing was not the torch. The first thing was a big Coca Cola truck on which attractive young women danced to loud music, distributing cans of soft drinks to the crowd. The second? Another Coke truck.

The third was a truck promoting Nissan cars. The fourth was a truck also featuring loud music and pretty young people dancing, this time for a Brazilian bank.

Things weren't meant to be this way.

When Rio won the hosting rights to the Games in 2009 the country was booming. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was so popular and successful that there was giddy talk of Brazil catapulting into the ranks of powerful developed nations. The Olympics would be a coming out party.

Since the Greek gods always punished hubris, maybe they’re to blame for what happened next.

Commodity prices plummeted and Brazil's economic miracle imploded. Then a gargantuan corruption network was uncovered, staining Lula's reputation (and putting him in prosecutors' crosshairs).

Lula's chosen successor Dilma Rousseff shrank into a lonely, widely hated politician facing imminent impeachment. Her replacement, Temer, is hardly more popular.

The extraordinary result is that Lula and Rousseff refused to attend the opening ceremony, while Temer showed up but was loudly booed. And when the final stage of impeachment starts next week, the biggest emotion in this country of 204 million at the departure of Rousseff will be indifference.

But the Olympics, like that torch relay, are unstoppable.

Never mind that Rio's state government ran out of money a few weeks before the Games, requiring a federal bailout. Never mind that public hospital and school staff and police spent months this year wondering whether they'd get paid.

The two week party for half a million tourists, 10,500 athletes and 25,000 or so media employees had to go on.

VIP limousines surrounded by motorcycle outriders roar night and day through the clogged streets of Copacabana and Barra. The rich and famous party at opulent national Olympic houses, often literally yards from abject poverty.

Some visitors, like a Portuguese government minister who was mugged in Ipanema, have had impromptu tastes of the other Rio.

But tourists are being protected by 85,000 soldiers and police, so little bad is likely to happen –  as long as they don’t stray a couple miles away into favelas where the only police around are locked in battles against drug gangsters.

No wonder many Cariocas came into the Olympics wishing the Games would just go away.

During the opening ceremony in the Maracana, I sat a block from the stadium in a typical Rio neighborhood bar. They had the ceremony on TV, of course, but hadn't even bothered to turn up the volume.

Inside the Maracana, Brazil at its best was on display -- creative, beautiful, culturally strong.

Outside, Cariocas had only their gritty worries about gun crime, lack of doctors and jobs for their children.

"I couldn't care at all about the ceremony," said office administrator Patricia Palma, 43, who was drinking a cold beer with friends. "It's always the same things they show and it's just a lot of money taken out of our pockets."

A few miles away in the seething favelas of Complexo do Alemao and Mare, the sense of alienation was even deeper.

"The Olympics are for the rich," said Marcos Enrique Nascimento, who drives a motorbike taxi. "No one comes here to ask us if anyone from the favela wants to see the Games."

But sport has a strange power and once the preliminaries ended, once athletes began to run, jump, fight, sail and hit balls, the mood changed.

The day after the Maracana show, I visited a new pedestrian area (one of the mayor's beloved legacies) in the old port and found big, excited crowds. Brazilians, it seemed, were suddenly in love with the Games.

Then there was USA’s Abbey D’Agostino and New Zealand’s Nikki Hamblin, who both fell in the 5,000-meter race. As Hamblin lay on the ground, dazed, D’Agostino leaned over and encouraged her to get up. “We have to finish this.”

As the two began to run again, the American woman hobbled. And Hamblin in turn, encouraged her competitor. They may not have won the race, but got the gold in sportsmanship.

My personal favorite was a tiny incident, well out of the spotlight.

Majlinda Kelmendi had just beaten Italy's Odette Giuffrida in judo and it was a big story because the gold was Kosovo's first ever medal. What got me, though, came after.

Sobbing with emotion, Kelmendi was so overcome she looked like she could barely stand. The weight of relief, joy, expectations – it all crushed her.

And who came to hug Kelmendi? Who raised the Kosovan's arm in victory in front of the crowd?

The defeated Giuffrida.

Those childhood Olympic dreams didn't seem to be such a fairy tale after all.