As Games End, Rio Celebrates While Looking Warily to Future
By SIMON ROMERO and ANDREW JACOBS
AUG. 21, 2016
RIO DE JANEIRO — The skies opened on Sunday
night over Maracanã, the stadium where Brazil bade
farewell to the Rio Olympics with a spectacle
celebrating everything from the giants of Brazilian
[5] music to the rock art drawn by tribesmen thousands
of years ago, as if the heavens were lamenting the
end of the 17-day sports extravaganza. Still, the
rainfall at the closing ceremony had little effect on the
spirits of the performers who praised towering
[10] creative figures and thinkers like the prolific composer
Heitor Villa-Lobos; the landscape architect Roberto
Burle Marx; and Niède Guidon, the archaeologist
whose discoveries in the remote caves of northeast
Brazil are challenging long-held beliefs about the
[15] peopling of the Americas.Nodding to Brazil’s diversity
as Latin America’s largest country, the ceremony also
honored facets of an astonishingly rich musical
heritage that are often overlooked, promoting As
Ganhadeiras de Itapuã, a group of former
[20] washerwomen rescuing Afro-Brazilian songs in
northeast Brazil, as well as Arnaldo Antunes, a poet
and vocalist who once sang for Titãs, a pioneering
São Paulo rock band. The Carnivalesque ceremony,
featuring frevo dancers twirling umbrellas, a
[25] performance by the samba legend Martinho da Vila
and the songs of Carmen Miranda, offered a folkloric
if fittingly upbeat bookend to an Olympiad that had
been shrouded in grim assessments and protests as
the Games approached. Despite widespread fears
[30] that the city would be unprepared, or that crime and
disorganization might turn the Olympics into a
national embarrassment, many Brazilians came to
view the Games as a triumph and a much-needed
distraction from the country’s economic malaise and
[35] political upheaval. In the days after the opening
ceremony, the criticisms that the Games were an
inappropriate use of public money at a time of crisis
were mostly subsumed by a sense that Brazil had
largely met the logistical challenges, delivering the
[40] world’s biggest sporting event for the half-million
visitors who flocked to Rio for South America’s first
Olympics.“We know the city isn’t an easy place to live
in, but Rio flung its arms wide open, and we need to
congratulate ourselves for our receptiveness and joy
[45] in making such a beautiful party,” said Naidê Gouvêa
Lira, 45, a logistics analyst. The ebullience was
further buoyed on Saturday by the Brazilian soccer
team’s win over Germany, a victory that yielded one
of the country’s seven gold medals in the Games and
[50] helped ease the sting of its humiliating 2014 World
Cup loss to the Germans. Over all, Brazilians seemed
satisfied with their relatively modest medal count,
which placed the country among the top 14 nations,
its best Olympic showing ever. Many are still savoring
[55] their first gold of the Rio Games, won in judo by
Rafaela Silva, 24, a black woman from an
impoverished part of Rio.“To see her win really lifted
our spirits,” said Fabio Costa dos Santos, 47, an
unemployed carpenter who, like Silva, hails from City
[60] of God, a favela in the city’s western suburbs. The
Games were far from trouble free. Even after the
authorities deployed an 85,000-strong security force
to ease crime fears, Portugal’s education minister was
robbed at knifepoint. An Olympic bus carrying
[65] journalists was attacked by people throwing rocks.
Outside the Olympic bubble, gun battles between the
police and drug gangs in Complexo do Alemão, a
collection of favelas, the poor urban areas that
emerged as squatter settlements, were a stubborn
[70] reminder of the untamed violence and yawning
inequities in a city that officials had promised would
be the world’s safest during the Games.
Acessado no dia 22 de agosto de 2016 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/22/sports/olympics/closingceremony-rio-games.html?ref=sports&r=0
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