Rio was supposed to be a clusterfvck. Well, what was the biggest embarrassment?

Behavior of the crowd during the pole vault

Fact that there were barely any crowds at all

Bizarre officiating (are the officials Brazilian? I assume they have an international selection). All the DQs, British high jumper getting a white flag even when the bar fell down, dq'ing half the field in order to get the Brazilian 4x4 team into the final...

Timetable (Finals in mornings)

Protesters during women's marathon finish

Irish ticket scandal.

Isinbayeva winning IOC post.

thejeff wrote:

All I can think of is green water, unnecessarily sharp turns in the marathon, and some leaky pipes.

Did Rio do better than expected?

I saw several grown kids of USATF employees with press credentials.

Attendance has to be the big one - okay Zika may have scared a bunch of visitors off but you would think a city the size of Rio could at least fill the stadium for the major events for what was certainly a once in a lifetime event in your hometown. I have to imagine tickets were pretty cheap by event time.

On a related note - how happy is the IOC that they chose Tokyo over Istanbul right now. That would have been awkward.

For me in no particular order my top five:

- Lochte incident

- Irish Olympic Exec ticket scandal

- Renaud Lavillenie booed on podium

- Diving Water

- Doping Controls issue

I think the political and social turmoil that occurred in Brazil between the time that they won their bid for the games and when the games began soured the local population in a big way on the Olympic games. The fans were just terrible. The attitude was basically screw the rest of the world if anyone from Brazil is competitive in the sport. Making an international incident out of Lochte was a big low self esteem moment for Brazil too. Pulling people off a plane and threatening prosecution for what was nothing more than a couple of guys acting dumb just to try to prove that Rio isn't that dangerous when everyone knows that it is was a dumb move. And while prosecuting people for falsely reporting a crime may be necessary in Brazil due to the corruption and gang activity, it is pretty bad to threaten foreigners with prosecution.

As someone who just got back from the games last night, let me tell you my thoughts on the failures:

1) No one spoke English. This is a big one. I have done loads of international travel, and have never been anywhere where less people spoke English. I am talking about not even speaking a single word and just 2 years after the World Cup. I got by in my broken Portuñol (I speak Spanish and French very fluently), but I felt especially bad for visitors from places like Asia that have zero Latin language background to rely on.

2) Stadiums were a facade. On the inside they looked spectacular, in fact they are among the nicest looking facilities I have ever seen, but step outside to go to the bathroom the walls and tiles were coming apart. The plumbing is so bad that they made you dump your toilet paper in a bin rather than flush it (gross), and the connected faucets in many times weren't finished and basically just hanging out of a hole in the wall. Several of them were never even opened. The Track was a one time use, but it barely survived the week of operation.

3) Athlete security. The police did a great job keeping the tourists "safe", although there methods would generate all kinds of lawsuits. They were openly discriminating against any "seedy" looking individuals, not allowing them on certain metros, near the beach, and other touristy areas. That said, there was no special attention given to athletes, who had very little assistance with navigation and transportation. As most were wearing their credentials around town it was pretty alarming that nothing happened. More so, in the track for example, the athlete exit included a 50m jaunt through open stadium to the transport without protection. I could have easily just tackled Mo Farah in between his semis - and in fact the only athlete that I saw skip this route was Bolt. Great for fans looking to grab autographs, but awful for the athletes.

4) Stadium food was awful. When I saw awful, I cannot understate it. Not only was it totally disgusting, but there wasn't enough of it and most of the time you would wait in line just to find out that the only thing left was potato chips. At the football stadium they stopped serving all concessions at 70 minutes, even though the final went into penalties. Logistically they did a poor job in general, not even having the souvenir cups for several afternoon sessions.

5) Hot water at athletes village. I didn't spend any time there, but my friends competing said that they were taking lukewarm showers at best.

6) Public transit / venue location. One of my biggest gripes was getting to and from the venues. Everyone was staying in Copa/Ipanema/Botafogo, as a central location between the park to the west and the stadiums to the north, but most of the time it took between an hour to an hour and a half to arrive at these venues from the first metro stop. I tried taking an uber back from the park (which was only possible from a designated area 2km from the actual exit) and it took me over 2 hours to get through traffic. The metros themselves were designed to separate tourists from locals, but they were insanely overcrowded, consistently late, and a pain in the ass overall. I spent more equal time in transit and at events, which is simply inexcusable.

7) Tickets and empty stadiums. I had to pay ridiculous amounts of cash to get tickets from the States and did so because in London scalping was nearly impossible. However, upon arrival there were scalpers everywhere, and the only night I saw the track over 50% capacity was on Thursday for Bolt's 200 final. In fact the only events that ever sold out were ones that Brazil was in, as Brazilians could get tickets for insanely cheap compared to the rest of the world. From what I understand, they allocated tickets equally to continents which was clearly a mistake.

I have never been to an Olympics before, but I have been to the World Cup in South Africa and also the recent Pan Ams in Canada. Based on the above I would Rio a C+ overall, passing but only because there wasn't any major incident. All of that said, Rio in General is fantastic and the vibe overall was sick. Good, cheap food and drinks, beautiful women, clean beautiful beaches and views, and parties all night. It was a fantastic trip for me, but a pretty mediocre games in terms of preparation.

The most embarrassing thing was seeing three guys on the medals podium for the women's 800m. I know Rio wasn't to blame, but still very very embarrassing.

worst olympics ever wrote:

Ratings down 38%....

That's not Rio. I blame NBC for their shit coverage.

Thanks for sharing :-)

I think the expectation was for a general facade. Sounds like Rio pretty much lived up to that.

BS wrote:

On a related note - how happy is the IOC that they chose Tokyo over Istanbul right now. That would have been awkward.

Yikes! Bullet dodged...literally!

Rio the DQ games... wrote:

thejeff wrote:

All I can think of is green water, unnecessarily sharp turns in the marathon, and some leaky pipes.

Did Rio do better than expected?

Rio's performance was about as I expected. Pretty poor compared to London and Beijing.

The most annoying thing was all the DQs in Track & Field.

The most embarrassing? Has to be all the US athletes giving the glory to some magic sky wizard. Can you believe all of these adults actually buy into fairy tales? It's comical.

Yeah when it's so obvious that all you need for life to begin and then evolve into incredibly complex interdependent systems is massive quantities of time.

Entropy schmentrophy!

Allowing the US back into the W4x100m after throwing the baton

ThunderThighs wrote:

It's obvious, Ryan Lochte and Team USA were the biggest embarrassments by far.

amen

Blah Blah. wrote:

The biggest embarrassment was the empty stadium.

+1.

Real people priced out of watching (assuming they wanted to watch).

Maybe it will be a TV-only event in a few years' time, with no crowds.

Thanks for the detailed run-down. I had made plans (and payments) for several months to attend the Games w/ a large contingent. Due to zika fears, our numbers dwindled precipitously until the price had to be rejiggered through the f'ing roof. So I didn't get to go. Your post illumined the good (of Rio) and the bad (of the Rio Games). Still, for all the problems you note, I will say that it turned out to be less of a cluster... than it could've been. No one died, for example. Amongst Olympic Games, I'd put it ahead of Munich '72 (b/c no one died), Berlin '36 (hosted by Hitler, end of story) and Moscow '80, where most of the world told the second world thanks but no thanks.

Every time we go to a beat up hell hole, people give us dire warnings. But what happens is the local rulers spruce up the area around the venues, by laying sewage and fresh water pipes, installing wi fi, electricity, and street lamps, etc. Then things go along just fine. it was the same at London, Athens, Moscow Worlds, Paris Worlds, etc. We should feel fortunate to live in the US/Canada where we have clean places everywhere. The rest of the world is not so lucky.

Blah Blah. wrote:

The biggest embarrassment was the empty stadium.

The military rulers should have passed out free tickets to the homeless and drug addicts. That's what they do in Eugene, Oregon.

I'm not a verified user, but I was also there. I agree with a lot of what you said:

1) Also surprised at the low percentage of people who spoke English, but there were enough volunteers everywhere that it wasn't hard to find one who could speak some English. I knew just enough Portuguese to get by, but I'm sure Asian visitors had problems like you said.

2) My personal favorite was a sink in the gymnastics arena that had no sink bowl or pipes to collect the water coming out of the faucet. It just splashed onto the floor. A lot of the bathrooms in the bigger, or more remote, arenas were temporary so I didn't have high expectations for them.

3) Didn't have much experience with this either way, so I can't comment

4) I didn't think the stadium food was AWFUL, but I'm not a very picky eater. It was frustrating that every venue had the same few options and that they did, at some bigger events, run out of food early. Eventually I just learned to eat anywhere I had the chance. I noticed that they ran out of souvenir beer cups at bigger venues, but I assume they were going through a lot more than anticipated.

5) I didn't ask anyone about this

6) IMO this was the worst part of the games. From Copa it took about an hour to get to the track and 1.5 hours to get to Olympic Park. I could not believe that they didn't put in a rail line to Olympic Park. The dedicated bus line was acceptable, but really made things difficult.

7) This was another point of frustration. I'm not sure if it's their fault, but tickets that I bought through CoSport (many months in advance of the games) were a lot more expensive. Once they opened up the Brazilian tickets (and prices) to everyone, I was able to buy a lot more tickets for a lot less money. I also was surprised that there were scalpers everywhere, but apparently it's illegal in Brazil to resell a ticket for more than face value.

I was at the track for the majority of sessions, and Bolt's 100m and 200m finals were the most crowded days, where it was essentially a sellout. I would agree that for a number of sessions it was about 50% full, and much less so for the morning sessions. For all the people griping about the steeplechase finals having no one in the stands, let me tell you that it was about 100 degrees at 11 a.m. local time and the sun was shining directly into the lower section. Combined with the humidity, it was awful. I was arguably the biggest steeplechase fan in the stadium aside from the runners and maybe their coaches, and even I was considering moving up into the shade. I'm not sure how well the live stream showed the crowd, but entire sections in the front were empty because they were in the sun! Also, just past the finish (on the first turn) the front sections were empty because they were reserved for athletes and coaches. But few, if any, athletes from another sport were going to travel from the Olympic Village (1.5 hours from the track) to a morning session with one final.

That being said, I agree that Rio in general was fantastic. I also really enjoyed the Olympics despite the issues mentioned above. It was a positive experience and I have no regrets about going.