Brazil’s Decade of Sport Bulletin: No 1

The first significant off-plan event of Brazil’s decade of global sport has just hit the streets. Some 200,000 protesters took to the streets of Rio to protest a new government statute that calls for a wider national distribution of Brazil’s newfound oil wealth. The protesters claim the new law will cripple Rio’s ability to host the World Cup 2014 and the Olympics 2016. The government responded that the oil royalties should be spread more evenly. The obvious solution is that the multinational oil companies should be expropriated, the oil industry should be fully nationalised and the wealth distributed according to a rational plan. Brazil might look to Venezuela for the way forward.

All this is reminiscent of the heated arguments around the London Olympics where the organisers claimed there would be a significant ripple effect from the Stratford Olympic development while the locals were far from convinced. We know for sure that the massive Dockland development has had an insignificant impact on the deep seated poverty in the surrounding Tower Hamlets area, and there is precious little sign that the Olympic Park will have any real impact on the impoverished lives of those living in some of the most deprived boroughs in Britain. The rhetoric is always uplifting but the reality quickly brings you back down to earth.

And now the global sporting circus is heading for Rio, home to some of the worse urban slums in South America. What can the residents of the giant favelas expect from the two mega events heading their way? Probably about the same as the residents of Tower Hamlets or the impoverished black citizens of South Africa – bugger all. The dispute highlights the real problem facing all the emerging BRIC countries, where huge discrepancies in wealth only become more pronounced when big spending events like the World Cup and the Olympics come to town. While the wealthy of Rio can expect to be samba-ing their way through the forthcoming global circus, the destitute will have plenty of time to ponder their desperate fate. That the debate should have taken a Rio versus the rest is most unfortunate. The real division should be the 1% plundering the 99%.

The mayor of Rio is making all sorts of dire warnings if the redistribution law is enacted. Hyping up the rhetoric he claims that the City will go broke, the Games will collapse and the state of RIo will not even be able to pay out for pensions and state wages. With just under two years to go until the World Cup this is startling news. Sporting Polemics has been polemicizing against these type of sporting extravaganzas for years, arguing that the beneficial trickle-down effect never seems to materialise. Just look at Greece for an example of inflated expectations. The Brazilian government’s redistribution law seems to make sense but already the bandwagon of FIFA, the IOC and the plundering corporate giants are indirectly distorting the national plan. Scale down the Olympics and the World Cup to manageable proportions and cities like Rio de Janeiro will be able to successfully share in the global limelight. As it stands they, like Athens, are threatened with bankruptcy.

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