The legacy of the Rio Olympics is a farce.
The closing ceremony was six months ago Tuesday, and already several of the venues are abandoned and falling apart. The Olympic Park is a ghost town, the lights have been turned off at the Maracana and the athlete village sits empty.
“It’s not a good look for us,†IOC member John Coates told Around the Rings in a story published Tuesday.
And yet it was one that so easily could have been avoided.
The IOC will no doubt blame organizers, politicians and everyone else who saw dollar signs in Rio’s grand plans. But the billions that were wasted, the venues that so quickly became white elephants, the crippling bills for a city and country already struggling to make ends meet — this is on the IOC as much as anyone.
It didn’t take a Nobel Prize economist to see Rio’s pitfalls back in the fall of 2009, when the IOC was selecting a 2016 host.
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