A Hurrah For No Complexo

‘The Rio Games is a grand success’, trumpet a few. A divided country begs to differ.

- Shobhan Saxena

Neymar Jr is no Mario Zagallo. Not yet. But after scoring the winning penalty against Germany in the match for the football gold, Neymar sounded as bruisingly redemptive as Zagallo, the legend involved in Bra­zil’s four World Cup triumphs. “Now they will have to swallow me,” said the Number 10, after about of hearty sobbing on the maracana pitch. This was Neymar’s shot at silencing his—and the Brazilian team’s—critics as he wore gold around his neck. A day later, the president of the Rio 2016 Organising Committee, Carlos Nuzman, too, echoed Zagallo when he asked his critics to “swallow the success” of the event. “It was a tremendous and extraordi­nary success. The world bowed to Rio,” Nuzman told a group of journalists on August 22, a day after the Games officially closed at the Maracana.

Even before thousands of athletes, officials, journalists and tourists left, the Brazilian establishment is busy patting its own back for its ‘success’ in organising the first-ever Olympics in South America.

The Modern Olympics, which started in 1896, still have an amphitheatrical feel to them. Every four years, thousands of athletes congregate in a large city to dazzle the world with their extraordinary abilities. It’s not just the athletes who want to outrun and outjump others, the host city—and the country—too wants to make a leap into a select club of global cities as Olympic hosts. Rio dreamt thus too. But just weeks before the circus arrived in town, it seemed Rio faced utter disaster: the Zika virus hit town and scared off athletes, bridges collapsed, ISIS terror cells were a probability and a sudden spike in murders made global headlines foretell doom.