“With the joy of life of the Brazilians, they turned this into a great party for everybody”.
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“There is no public money in the organisation of this Olympic Games”.
International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach said Saturday that the troubled Rio Olympics, marked by financial crisis and empty stadiums, have been “iconic” and Brazil have been “great” hosts.
Contentiously, he said of Russian athlete whistleblower Yulia Stepanova, a former doper who helped uncover the state-backed, systematic drug program running in her homeland: “We are not responsible for dangers to which Ms.Stepanova may be exposed”. “We are ready to face social reality and address it”, he said.
They have claimed that the funding for both events is combined and can not be treated as completely separate. “He noted that NBC, the broadcast rights holder in the USA, has already reached 2.25 billion live streaming minutes – 750 million minutes more than all previous Olympic Games combined”. But also the new ones, like the Velodrome, ” he said. “These Olympic Games are the most clicked-on and most shared Olympic Games ever”.
Rio was awarded the right to host first Olympics in South America in 2009 when Brazil had a booming economy.
Though International Paralympic Committee president Sir Philip Craven is openly expressing concern about attendances to those Games yet to come, Bach likened the slow sales for the Paralympics to a recollection of the situation in London four years ago.
Football is one of 30 golds on offer on Saturday, seven of them at the Olympic Stadium where British distance great Mo Farah, his 10,000m defence completed, seeks to retain his 5,000m title and become the first man since Finland’s Lasse Viren in 1976 to retain two Olympic distance titles. Now with the Games it will be 63%.
He said he felt convinced the events would leave “a much better Rio de Janeiro after the Olympic Games” and denied the costs of staging the event had exceeded initial budget forecasts when the city was in a contrasting position economically. The 25-year-old continues to divide opinion in the athletics world because of her condition of hyperandrogenism, which causes elevated testosterone levels that some rivals say give her an unfair advantage.
A day before the closing ceremony of the first Olympics on the South American continent, Bach said: “These were and still are iconic Olympic Games in many respects”.
He added that it had been good for the Games to see the “social reality” in Rio, a city marked by violent crime and huge wealth disparities.
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Mr Bach said witnessing the social and economic problems the Brazilian people faced on a daily basis served to put the power and the limitations of sport into perspective.
