Rio de Janeiro re-lights its Olympic pyre to pass the baton to Tokyo

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Rio de Janeiro, the host city of the 2016 Olympic Games, lit its ceremonial Olympic pyre on Thursday night in a symbolic act to pass the baton to Tokyo, its successor, which will inaugurate the 2020 Olympic Games on Friday.

The ceremony that marks the passing of the baton from one host city to its successor, in which two children, students at a municipal Olympic village, lit the Olympic cauldron of Brazil’s most emblematic city, was attended by the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, Eduardo Paes, and the Japanese consul general in the city, Ken Hashiba.

Rio de Janeiro’s Olympic pyre, part of a 12-meter-tall work of art, had been turned off since the closing ceremony of the 2016 Olympic Games and will now be lit again until the end of the event in Tokyo.

Rio’s pyre, a tourist attraction in the port area located in front of the historic Candelaria church, crowns a work of art by U.S. sculptor Anthony Howe that mimics the sun and whose huge stainless steel flagpoles move in different directions according to the wind.

“We managed, with an adverse scenario, to offer an unforgettable Games. They were Olympic Games that delighted the world. From the point of view of their organization, they were a great success and left a huge legacy to the city,” Paes said at the ceremony.

Despite highlighting the legacy of the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Paes, in a ceremony on Thursday morning, announced new uses for the facilities that were built for the 2016 event and that remained abandoned.

According to the mayor, three of the sports stadiums in Rio’s Olympic Park will be converted into municipal schools, and other spaces will be offered in concession to the private sector.

The arenas that were built for handball and aquatic activities will be dismantled, and four schools will be built with their parts, a project that will have an estimated cost of R$78 million (about US$15 million) and which, according to the mayor, should start in September to be ready in 2023.

According to the mayor, the Tennis Center and other pavilions of the Olympic Park will be given in concession to the private sector in a bidding process scheduled for next November.

The Olympic facilities that were the pride of the “cidade maravilhosa” in 2016 and that cost more than R$40 billion (about US$8 billion at the current exchange rate) are today abandoned, deteriorated, and stained by corruption scandals that left the million-dollar diversions of public resources discovered during the works.