A blustery storm, a touch of melancholy and a sense of pride converged at the closing ceremony of the 2016 Olympics on Sunday as Brazil breathed a collective sigh of relief at having pulled off South America’s first Games.
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Additionally, NBCOlympics.com and the NBC Sports app will offer a live stream of the Closing Ceremony in real-time as it unfolds from the Maracana Stadium in Rio de Janeiro.
In the last of 306 medal ceremonies, International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach draped the gold around the neck of Kenya’s Eliud Kipchoge, victor of the men’s marathon earlier in the day.
With the Olympic anthem reverberating through Maracana Stadium, the flag was lowered.
International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach declared the Rio Games over and the Olympic flag was formally handed over to the governor of Tokyo, which will host the 2020 Summer Games.
The closing ceremony Sunday celebrated the 16-day spectacle that was the Rio Games, which combined numerous highlights with ugly and even weird episodes that sometimes overshadowed competition. So Abe turned into the Japanese video game plumber Mario and then popped up in the flesh out of a huge green pipe in the stadium that he allegedly used as a shortcut to get from Tokyo to Rio. There was a tribute to cave paintings of some of the first inhabitants of the Americas, in Serra da Capivara, in Northeastern Brazil, today one of the nation’s poorest regions.
But one of the biggest stars was absent – Brazil soccer great Pele. It is one of the most important words in Brazilian Portuguese.
These games certainly had their magic moments. The military and police presence was extraordinary with 85,000 troops fanned out across venues, streets and transport hubs, double the deployment in London four years ago.
Rio will be remembered for the comeback of American swimmer Michael Phelps, who won five golds and one silver to reinforce his distinction as the most decorated Olympian of all time.
One of the major concerns for Brazilians is what will be the final cost of the Games for a country and how much they actually helped improve the city’s infrastructure. The economy is mired in its worst recession in decades, and later this week the Senate is expected to begin the trial on whether to permanently remove suspended President Dilma Rousseff, who was impeached in May for breaking fiscal rules in her managing of the federal budget. When the cauldron in Rio goes out tonight, those games will be only 536 days away.
That wasn’t a given going in.
And come Monday, with the Games no longer a distraction, Brazil gets back to its dour reality of dueling political and economic crises.
“Nothing left to prove”, Bolt said.
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This story has been corrected to reflect that Brazil’s loss to Germany in the 2014 World Cup was in a semifinal, not final.
