The_Guardian_-_2016-12-29

Tuesday 27 December 2016 15.24 GMT Last modified on Tuesday 27 December 2016 22.00 GMT
On the seventh day of the Games, it seemed, for a brief, bewildering moment, as though a bomb had
gone off in the Olympic Park. A thunderclap sounded around the aquatics stadium and echoed across
the food court. No one fled. Instead everyone sped towards the scene. It turned out that Brazilian
police had detonated a discarded rucksack – they later explained that it had contained a jacket and a
pair of socks – and then opened the gates to the basketball arena, where Spain were about to play
Nigeria. All those running people were just in a rush to take their seats. Otherwise, no one blinked
because it was the third similar incident in a week. There had been another detonation during the
men’s cycling road race and a third outside the Maracanã. That familiar phrase, “controlled
explosion”, seems now to sum up the Rio Olympics.
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If anything it implies that the authorities had more control than they really did. Brazil was in the midst
of its worst recession since the Great Depression. In March the man who brought the Olympics to the
city, the former president Lula Inácio da Silva, was arrested as part of the investigation into
government corruption. In May, his successor Dilma Rousseff was suspended after the senate voted to
start impeachment proceedings against her. Neither were welcome at the opening ceremony of the
very Games they had arranged, and which was supposed to have been their legacy. Instead, the
interim president, Michel Temer, was there. He took the precaution of arranging for the music to be
turned up extra loud when he took to the stage. You could still hear the boos.
USA’s Simone Biles bewitched the world, winning four golds as she lit up the gymnastics arena.
Photograph: Dmitri Lovetsky/AP
Earlier that same day hundreds of protestors gathered on the waterfront. They were cut off from the
grand Copacabana Palace hotel, where the IOC’s mandarins had gathered, by a cordon of riot police,
part of an army of 85,000 out on the streets. Many of them were working to try to suppress crime in
the favelas, where residents found themselves under “a state of semi-siege”, with soldiers stationed at