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CHAPTER 1
OLYMPIC and PARALYMPIC GAMES 2016
The Olympic Games will be held in Rio between 3rd and 21st August 2016 with 10,500 participants from 206 countries. The Paralympic Games will be held between 7th and 18th September with 4,350 athletes from 176 countries
Nobody doubts that Rio can offer spectacular scenery, but can it offer safety? Even without the growing threat of international terrorism, Rio is notorious for muggings, shoot outs, and the danger of stray bullets. The biggest victims are always local people, especially shantytown residents, but tourists can be targets too. So security will be a major concern.
This is the first ever Olympic Games to be held in South America. Brazil, in spite of being one of the world's most populous countries, has never won many medals, partly because the fascination with football left little room for other sports. But it has begun to improve: in the 2012 London Olympics it came 22nd, and in the 2015 Toronto Pan-American Games, Brazil for the first time surpassed Cuba, taking third place behind the United States and Canada.
History
Throughout the last century, it was the determination of individual athletes, many from extremely poor backgrounds, that won medals. Brazil's first Olympic Champion, Adhemar da Silva, who won the triple jump in 1952 and 1956, explained that he took up athletics because 'I liked the sound of the word 'athlete' and I decided I wanted to be one.'
Brazil's next medal winner, João Carlos de Oliveira, worked from the age of seven, and found his way into athletics via the army. Nicknamed 'João do Pulo' (Jumping John), he should have won gold for the triple jump at the 1980 Moscow Games, but his record leap was unfairly disqualified in order to favour Soviet athletes who took gold and silver. Just a year later a car accident, in which he lost a leg, prematurely ended his career.
In the 1984, 1988, 1992 and 1996 Games, the Grael brothers, Lars and Torben, of Danish descent, indulged their love of sailing to win medals for Brazil. Torben remains the Brazilian with the highest number, five.
But throughout the 20th century, Brazi&lgrave;s Olympic pretensions suffered from the overwhelming dominance of football. Soccer drew the crowds, the funding and the media coverage while other sports struggled for recognition and support.
Hosting the Games, coupled with the disillusionment caused by the national football team's disastrous 7-1 defeat by Germany in the 2014 World Cup, has helped to change this.
The Rio Games
The Rio Games, like almost all recent Games, are ambitious, overspent and at the end of 2015, several of the venues were still being built.
They will take place at four different locations, in and around Rio. The heart of the Games will be in the Barra da Tijuca, west of Rio, with the sea on one side and mountains and lagoons on the other. Here is the Olympic Park, Village, Press Centre and 15 competition venues, including a new golf course for the latest Olympic sport.
Also in the west of Rio is the Deodoro Olympic Park, based around military installations, with the second largest group of competition venues, including athletics, equestrian events, shooting, and aquatic sports.
In the city's south, Copacabana will host the beach volley events, while the Fort at one end of the four km long beach will be the centre for triathlon, cycling road race and swimming events. The inland lagoon, Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas will have rowing and canoeing.
The fourth venue will be the Maracanã soccer stadium in the north of the city, which will be the scene for the opening and closing ceremonies, and some of the track events. Not far away, the Sambódromo, purpose built for the annual Carnival parades, will become an archery arena and will provide the finishing line for the Marathon.
Legacy
The permanent legacy of the Games includes the revitalization of the rundown port area, with the demolition of the ugly elevated concrete highways that slashed across the seafront, hiding historic buildings. They have been replaced by two big road tunnels, one a mile long, the other, almost two miles long (1480 m and 3000 m long respectively) -making it Brazil's largest urban tunnel. The renewed area has been renamed Porto Maravilha – the Marvellous Port, a reference to Rio's theme song, Cidade Maravilhosa. Within it, several historic churches and palaces have been restored, and two new Museums –the Museum of Tomorrow and MAR, the Rio Art Museum have been built.
Ambitiously, Rio's mayor, Eduardo Paes, has claimed that, besides bricks and mortar, the legacy of the 2016 Rio Olympics will be tolerance, peace and social inclusion, calling them the 'Inclusion Games.
Human rights organizations, on the other hand, prefer to call them the 'Exclusion Games', because of the negative impact they will have on some of Rio's poorest citizens.
A number of poor communities have been forcibly removed to make way for projects connected to the Games and other large scale sporting events. Evicted families are mostly rehoused in projects on the outskirts of Rio, sometimes up to sixty kilometres away from their original communities, usually with inadequate infrastructure.
The billion dollar investments being made in public transport will benefit the better off, like the new 16-km Metro line connecting the predominantly middle class Zona Sul to the Barra da Tijuca, the main Games venue. A new streamlined VLT, or light railway, to run from the port area, via the bus station to the local airport, Santos Dumont, will be a boon to tourists, although it is unlikely to be ready in time for the Games. But neither of these projects will benefit the millions of cariocas who travel in to work every day from the sprawling slums and settlements on the old, overcrowded, unreliable suburban trains.
An improved environment was also supposed to be part of the legacy, including the depollution of the heavily contaminated Guanabara Bay and other water sports venues. But out of five promised sewage treatment units, by the end of 2015 only one was ready. For the athletes taking part in water sports the quality of the water remains a major concern.
The new golf course was built in a conservation area of mangroves and wetland and a new expressway, the Transolímpica, linking two of the Olympic sites, has been driven through an area of the Mata Atlântica, or Atlantic Forest, Brazil's most threatened bioma, ignoring environmental laws.
Holding the Games in Rio, a city where violence is endemic, means that public security is a major headache. The local authorities have put their faith in 'pacification' programmes in the shantytowns previously dominated by organized crime and drug gangs. Police stations, called UPPs, or Police Pacification Units, are set up inside the favelas, manned by police officers trained to work with communities.
Results have been mixed: while the scheme has led to a sharp drop in crime and murders in some of the favelas, in others there has been a regression to the old unreformed police ways, where the local population is seen as the enemy and treated accordingly. In 2015, a 10 year old boy was shot dead by police as he stood in the doorway of his house in the Complexo do Alemão. The police officer claimed he had acted in legitimate defence, and was returning fire from bandits, although there was no evidence of a shootout. Also in 2015, five teenagers and young men in a car were stopped by police looking for criminals, and although unarmed, their car was riddled with over 100 bullets, killing them all. This sort of behaviour makes it very difficult for the community to trust the police.
During the Games, thousands of extra police and troops will be deployed to keep the venues and tourist attractions safe. Social control - buses from poor suburbs being stopped to prevent possible muggers reaching the beaches of Copacabana - and social cleansing, with the round-up of homeless people, including street children, will be deployed to make sure that the Games are peaceful. But for many of Rio's inhabitants, it will mean that they are excluded, not included, in the Olympic party.
Football
The Olympic and Paralympic Games will produce new heroes, maybe popularize new sports. But the attraction of football will continue, because the country's relationship with the sport is far more complex than the clichés suggest. Since its introduction in the 1890s, football has not only entertained but been used to exclude and to control.
'The English invented it, Brazilians perfected it' (old Brazilian saying) In 1894 Charles Miller, the Brazilian-born son of a Scottish rail engineer, returned from his schooling in England with a football in his trunk and the desire to continue playing the game he had grown to love. He organized matches between teams of young men working for the newfound utility companies, gas, electricity and railways, in São Paulo. Another son of British immigrants, Oscar Cox, founded Brazil's first football club, Fluminense, in Rio in 1902.
At first the new game was the leisure pursuit of privileged Anglo-Brazilians, who did not appreciate their 'noble game' being played by the largely non-white lower classes, and did their best to prevent others from playing or even watching the sport.
The elite's determination to keep football for the white and rich was rooted as much in an attempt to maintain the status quo as in racist Victorian attitudes. In 1888 Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery and, by the time football arrived, the country had a growing underclass largely made up of former slaves.
However, the ease with which the game could be understood and played made it difficult for the privileged class to keep the new sport to itself. By 1910 makeshift pitches had sprung up across Brazil, as informal kickabouts took place on streets and spare pieces of land, with oranges or rolled-up socks for balls.
In a last-ditch attempt to keep out the underclass, Brazil's official clubs insisted that players must be amateurs and have another source of income, largely ruling out black players from poorer backgrounds. Mixed-race players who managed to join official clubs were subjected to racist abuse and vilification.
It was not until Vasco da Gama, Rio's Portuguese club, started picking players because of their ability rather than their race that the white elite's grip on the game began to loosen.
Alex Bellos, in his book Futebol, The Brazilian Way of Life, tells how the Vasco club got round the insistence on amateur status by employing their players in the shops and factories of Rio's Portuguese community.
When the elite clubs responded by insisting that players know how to write their own names in order to play in matches – a test that most of Vasco's illiterate players failed – the club organized literacy classes and got many players to shorten their long names, starting the tradition of Brazilian players using abbreviations or nicknames.
Bellos argues that football's racist origins also helped to forge the Brazilian style of play: black players who came up against white players used dribbling and other improvised skills to avoid physical contact with their opponents and the retaliation that could be expected to follow.
In the 1930s the power of football as a unifying national force, rather than a divisive game, was recognised by the government.
President Getúlio Vargas, who had come to power after a revolution in 1930, centralized the organisation of the sport, creating a national football council and funding Brazil's trip to the 1938 World Cup in France, where they reached the semifinals. The team and its style of play were personified by centre-forward Leônidas, who became Brazil's first football hero, and is credited with inventing the bicycle kick. The national team, or seleção, became a symbol that all Brazilians could understand and support.
The rising importance of Brazil as a power in football was acknowledged in 1950, when the country was chosen to stage the first FIFA World Cup after the Second World War. The famous Maracanã stadium was built in Rio for the tournament, and on 16 July 1950 some 200,000 spectators crowded into it, expecting to see the national team defeat Uruguay in the final and take the Jules Rimet trophy. Instead Uruguay won 2–1, causing national woe, heart attacks and even some suicides among fans.
In 1958 everything changed, thanks to the arrival of a new star: Edson Arantes do Nascimento, better known as Pelé. Only 17 at the time of the tournament, he scored two goals in the final against the home team, Sweden, and Brazil went on to win 5–2. Brazil won again in 1962, but it is the dazzling team of the 1970 tournament that is widely considered the greatest of all time. Jairzinho, Rivelino, Tostão and, of course, Pelé inspired the seleção to a third victory, the footage of which – broadcast around the world in colour for the first time – helped to cement the iconic status of the team in the yellow shirts.
Brazil also won the 1994 and 2002 World Cups, making them champions five times, more than any other team.
Women's football
The most talented woman footballer in the world is Brazilian Marta Vieira da Silva, chosen FIFA World Player of the Year five times and known as 'Pelé in skirts'. But in spite of Marta's success, the national women's team has received little encouragement from Brazil's football authorities. Between 1965 and 1982, women were even banned altogether from the game. Recent signs are more hopeful: a new women's football league of 20 teams was formed in December 2013, with funding from a state bank, and Brazil has decided to bid for the 2019 Women's World Cup.
Corruption
The sport has also made fortunes and political careers. During the military regime, giant stadiums were built across the country in an attempt to bolster political support for the government. Corruption scandals, rigged matches and bribed referees in the domestic leagues are common, and many of the clubs and federations have been run by the same officials for decades. Known as cartolas (literally 'top hats'), these officials enjoy immense power and prestige and have become wealthy men. Election candidates still make donations to local teams in exchange for votes.
Perhaps inevitably, leading Brazilian football administrators have been caught up in the widening investigation into corruption centred on the international football federation, FIFA. In November 2015, the former head of the Brazilian Football Federation and chief of the Brazilian World Cup, José Maria Marin, appeared in a New York federal court after being extradited from Switzerland. A Brazilian parliamentary commission of enquiry was set up to investigate Marin and his two predecessors, Marco Polo del Nero, and Ricardo Teixeira.
CHAPTER 2
Culture
Brazilian culture is spectacularly vibrant and rich, something that is no doubt a consequence of the country's huge geographical and ethnic diversity, and the enormous social and economic upheavals it has undergone, from the impact of colonialism and slavery, through successive waves of modernization, to its contemporary prominence in the globalized world. At the level of popular culture, African and Amerindian traditions lie at the heart of Brazilian music, dance, popular religion and a huge array of regional and local festivities. But Brazil has also produced some of the most radical and influential experimental movements in the arts, from the avant-garde modernist poets, painters, composers and prose writers of the 1920s, such as Mário de Andrade, Heitor Villa-Lobos and Oswald de Andrade, with his theory of 'cultural cannibalism', to the innovators in the visual and performance arts in the years since the Second World War, such as the Concretists and Neo-Concretists, Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed, and the Tropicalistas.
Although less known abroad, a strong tradition of fiction and poetry is belatedly reaching non-Brazilian audiences in translation, and it includes world-class names such as Machado de Assis, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, João Guimarães Rosa, Clarice Lispector and João Cabral de Melo Neto. At every step, Brazilian culture has brought together a deep sense of local, regional and national identities, a cosmopolitan appetite for international innovation and a magical ability to incorporate, synthesize and recreate in fresh, original ways.
Search for identity
The search for a distinctive Brazilian identity to replace the prevailing Eurocentrism of art and politics permeated much of the 20th century's literature, art and music. Indigenous and black culture were rediscovered and the dehumanization of the modern industrial world rejected. Out went waltzes and polkas, in came the samba. Erudite composer Heitor Villa-Lobos wove the popular rhythms and melodies of the choro into his music and created the famous Bacchianas Brasilianas. Mário de Andrade wrote Macunaíma, the story of an anti-hero. Based on a legend of the Makuxi Indians, Macunaíma is an outrageous, amoral trickster and survivor who lives on his wits and so was seen as a fitting hero for modern Brazilians. For some, the book was also the first example of what was to become Latin America's most successful literary export, magical realism. The Week of Modern Art, first held in 1922 to mark 100 years of independence, became a landmark annual event.
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Excerpted from "Brazil Inside Out"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Jan Rocha and Francis McDonagh.
Excerpted by permission of Practical Action Publishing.
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