Brazil: Rio de Janeiro continues to recycle its Olympic legacy six years later

On August 5, 2016, the Olympic flame shone in Rio de Janeiro’s Maracanã stadium and illuminated for two weeks a city that invested vast amounts of money in making itself beautiful for the event.

Six years later, the “Marvelous City” still recycles part of the structures erected at that time.

The huge beams that formed the skeleton of the Olympic Games press center, where hundreds of journalists worked, had been waiting for years for a destination. They will finally be dismantled and used to create a new bus station many kilometers away in the city’s central harbor area.

“Since last year, we have been complying with the Olympic legacy plan. We did not want structures erected for the Olympic Games to become a “white elephant”; this technical gallery of the International Broadcast Center [IBC] is an example of that,” celebrated the mayor, Eduardo Paes, in announcing the project.

Of the total of 1,400 tons of steel in the center, almost half will be reused for the new transport terminal, saving the public coffers R$22 million (US$4.2 million). The total cost amounts to R$250 million.

The new station will be called Terminal Gentileza in homage to José Datrino, the prophet Gentileza, a peculiar character much loved in the city who left his thoughts on the pilasters of a nearby viaduct.

When completed in late 2023, the intermodal station will bring 22 bus lines, two streetcar lines, and the BRT (Bus Rapid Transport) corridor of Avenida Brasil, the main artery into the city. It is expected to be used daily by 130,000 people.

ACCUSATIONS

The Rio City Hall defends that the reuse of the Rio 2016 facilities should have started quickly, as soon as the athletes left, and blames the previous administration, of Mayor Marcelo Crivella (2016-2020), for paralyzing everything that was planned to avoid Olympic waste.

The pavilion where the handball tournaments were held, for example, was to be dismantled in parts and converted into four public schools, but not the works did not begin until last March.

The Olympic swimming pool where Michael Phelps and other stars trained will also be dismantled this year and moved to the neighboring city of Maricá.

Despite the delay in plans to recycle the competition venues, the Olympic Park, located in Barra da Tijuca, is far from being an abandoned territory. According to city hall plans, the most underutilized facility, the velodrome, will soon become an Olympic museum.

For the time being, the area, a colossal extension equivalent to 118 soccer fields, usually hosts sports competitions and all kinds of events, such as the Rock in Rio music festival, which next September will bring hundreds of thousands of people back to the Olympic pavilions.

With information from Sputnik