Rio offers Olympics scenic beauty, even if they speak the “wrong” language

On a certain level, I can see why the International Olympic Committee was eager to have a summer Olympiad staged in the city that inspired the song, “The Girl from Ipanema.”

It’s going to be that tropical beauty and the beaches that provide a scenic setting for an Olympiad that can’t be rivaled by many other places on Planet Earth.

FOR THOSE PEOPLE who were determined to think of the United States and its official bid in Chicago as the front-runner, one has to consider that there’s probably only one place in our nation that could compete with Rio.

It certainly wasn’t Chicago. It would have been Honolulu.

Seriously, envision the idea of the top athletes of the world getting leis around their necks, along with their medals. Picture the hula dancers and the tropical sunshine, along with the volcanoes in the background.

It would have made for a unique Olympic setting, and it is something comparable to what the world will get seven years from now when the games go to the River of January.

IF ANYTHING, PRESIDENT Barack Obama’s biggest mistake in terms of lobbying for the games to be held in his home country may well be that he supported holding them in his adopted home city, rather than the town he actually grew up in.

Not that this commentary is meant to be a serious piece touting the likelihood of someday holding an Olympiad on the Hawaiian islands. I’m well aware that the city of Honolulu itself is too small to take on the kind of infrastructure improvements needed to ever seriously think of holding such an event (although one could argue that if Atlanta could host a games, anyone could).

It’s just that I’m not about to get worked up against the idea that the Olympics are going to be held in a Latin American city, and for the first time ever will be held on the South American continent.

Keep in mind that Latin American and South American are not synonymous. The games were held in Mexico City in 1968 (the Olympiad most often remembered in the United States for those two U.S. teammates who offended Anglo-America by giving the “black power” salute).

THERE ALSO WAS that Olympics held in 1992 in Barcelona, but anything affiliated with Spain tends to create odd emotions in the mindset of the modern-day Latino – who doesn’t particularly like being reminded that a whole group of indigenous peoples on the two continents are only inclined to think of themselves as one because of the way the Spanish conquistadors pushed their language and Catholic church, among other things, onto us.

So what kind of Olympics will we get from Brazil, the Latin American nation where Portuguese, rather than Spanish, is the official language?

It could be intriguing, because Brazil has its own athletic traditions, particularly when it comes to soccer. It is Brazil that has been able to put together national teams that can compete with the elite futbol programs of Europe.

It also has been speculated how wonderful Brazil could be if the nation were to put as much attention into the rest of their society as they do in the national soccer program.

SO THERE’S ALWAYS potential for athletic greatness to take place there.

Then again, some people are bound to become obsessed with the crime rates and the conditions caused by narcotics traffickers. Rio itself is first in Brazil in terms of firearms-related deaths, and some cite the proximity of shantytowns located next to wealthy communities as a potential for problems.

Yet such things can happen anywhere.

There literally was one of the groups that opposed placing the Olympiad in Chicago that cited the proximity of the proposed Olympic Stadium in Washington Park to some impoverished neighborhoods – which could have resulted in poor black people getting to sit on their porches and watch while rich people drove up to the stadium in shuttle buses, watched the sporting events, then drove away without having any contact with the locals.

I’M SURE SIMILAR examples could have been found in Madrid and Tokyo – the other two cities that were in the running for the 2016 summer games.

So we now have something to look forward to come ’16. At the very least, the grand-daughters of the Girl from Ipanema will provide an enhancement of the local scenery for the two weeks that the games go to Rio.

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