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Exclusive: How Rio won its bid

 to host the 2016 Olympics

Friday, 02 October 2009

 

By David Owen in Copenhagen

October 2 - If anyone harboured

lingering doubts over whether

the International Olympic Committee

 (IOC) made the right choice

 in the Danish capital today,

 they evaporated within seconds

 of the start of the victorious

 Rio de Janeiro press conference.

The atmosphere of exuberance before the massed

 ranks of the world’s television cameras was so

 overpowering that even Jacques Rogge, the legendarily sober

 IOC boss, cracked a smile.

As the host-city contract was signed, the aisles

 rang out with song as supporters gave vent to

 months – in some cases years – of bottled-up tension. 

Let’s just say it was no surprise when some

 Brazilian geezer took it upon himself to scatter

 golden confetti over proceedings.

Yet the main lesson from Rio’s win had little to do

 with its global reputation as a good-time town. 

The Brazilians had done their homework and

 prepared mightily for this special moment. 

Plus they had endured disappointments

 along the way.

In the race for the 2012 Games, Rio

 didn’t make it onto the shortlist. 

What they did do was react to the

 defeat in exactly the right way.

As Rogge observed tonight, Carlos Nuzman

 and his team "remained humble".

He went on: "Rio wanted to listen, to correct

 the shortcomings. 

"They learnt a lot." 

Two elements in particular transformed them

 from also-rans into winners in what was the

 toughest-ever Olympic hosting race with the

 exception of that contest for 2012.

First, they gathered critical experience in the

 complex disciplines of staging multi-sports events

 by hosting the Pan-American Games two years ago.

This was touched on by Sergio Cabral,

 Governor of Rio de Janeiro state, when he alluded

to a "new model of policing" introduced for the Games

 – an innovation that helped to address one

 of the bid’s possible weaknesses: Rio’s

 reputation as a relatively crime-ridden metropolis.

They also signed up the Government,

in the shape of the irrepressibly ebullient

 President Lula, for the long haul.

His appearance in Copenhagen contrasted

strongly with the Air Force One-powered

 flit undertaken by President Barack Obama. 

The time and energy Lula devoted to getting

 under the skin of the Olympic Movement

 gave him a markedly better feeling than

 his US counterpart for which strings to pull

 and buttons to press to get the result he wanted from

 this endlessly fascinating electorate.

Having addressed these two basics

– and being imbued in the form of Nuzman

 and Joao Havelange, the longest-serving IOC

 member, with two senior figures the Movement

 knew it could do business with - Rio was in

 a much stronger position to tweak the IOC’s

 sense of guilt about never having taken its

 sporting pageant to the South American sub-continent.

Lula pressed this as far as he dared in the

 presentation, urging the IOC to "light the

 Olympic cauldron in a tropical country".
 

This message eventually hit home, as shown

 by the emphatic margin of victory in Rio’s run-off against Madrid. 

As Richard Carrión, the IOC member

 from Puerto Rico who is one of the body’s

 leading business strategists, observed

straight after Rio’s victory was declared:

"I don't think it is anything to do with heads of state. 

"I think Rio captured the moment with

 the idea of bringing the Games to

 South America for the first time…So kudos to Rio."

A second fundamental thrust to its

 campaign right up to the finishing-line

 was to underline time and time again not,

 as you might have expected, Rio’s legendary

 status as a party town, but that Brazil, unlike in

 days gone by, was now a sound financial bet.

Cabral took pains to emphasise that the

 government would subsidise the organizing

 committee to the tune of $700 million (£439 million).

 (The figure is underlined and typed in

bold in my copy of Cabral’s text.)

In this context, the inclusion of Central Bank

 Governor Henrique Meirelles in the

 presentation team was a master-stroke. 

He had the gravitas to talk about Brazil’s

 booming economy with far more authority

 than the incorrigibly bullish Lula could have mustered.

Perhaps the message to the United States

 Olympic Committee should be that next time

 the country bids, the President should be

 accompanied on Air Force One by

 Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve President.

In retrospect, though they appeared to be

 closing in the final weeks of the campaign

 – and though their first-round elimination was

 met with gasps of astonishment – Chicago

 left it until far too late to start singing

from the IOC’s song-sheet.

Though the bid was technically as sound

 as any ever mounted by a US city, too many sources

 of friction had emerged in the course

 of a long campaign for it to do itself justice.

Ultimately, not even a bravura performance

 by the First Lady could undo the damage.

In this sense, the biggest message from tonight’s

 result is that it is becoming nearly impossible

 for even the world's only superpower to win a race

 of this calibre coming from a long way

 behind in the finishing straight.

There may be no stopping them now.

Brazil is already staging the 2014 World Cup. 

And there was talk from some bright spark

 in that exultant final conference of a

 Winter Olympic bid some time after 2016.

In their current mood, the ice-bound cities

 of the world must hope he was joking. 


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