The blinkered Western media’s attempts to belittle Brazil and disparage the run-up to Rio 2016, with stories of shortcomings, scandals, and scares, have totally failed. The spectacular opening ceremony of the 31st Olympiad at Maracanã Stadium and successful conclusion of the two-week-long games were a poke in the eye and slap in the face of the naysayers.
In the lead up to Rio Olympics, mainstream Western media outlets were vying with each other to push out stories about shoddily constructed venues, meager infrastructure, sewage polluted waters and poor facilities at the Olympic village. Filling the media space, were also news about political standoffs, corruption, protests, unemployment, poverty and crime in Brazil. These stories were interspersed with constant scaremongering about Zika virus and its potential implication on visitors to the Games, and, to top off, there was the Russian doping scandal.
The so-called ‘independent’ Western media, some of whom brandish self-tattooed titles of being the “world’s broadcaster”, have always struggled to find anything positive to say about events held away from their backyards. Witness the scores of stories they carried about human rights violations prior to the 2008 Olympics in China, the non-stop barrage of vitriolic against Russia, and President Putin, prior to the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014, and the doomsday scenarios painted before the current Rio 2016.
Of course, the same bigoted media found everything to be picture-perfect about the London Olympics in 2012 and other Games held in Western cities. Stories about bungled opening-ceremonies, drug-tainted athletes, fecal contaminated Olympic pools, spy-cams in bathrooms of women athletes and hundreds of people displaced by Olympic venues, never made it to prime news. Similarly, the intriguing story about a retractable roof over the 1976 Montreal Olympic stadium, which only retracted 22 years after the Games ended, went unreported. We could go on… about slack security, biased referring, racist chants, official harassments and provocations at various Games in Western cities, but none of them made headlines.
As the 31st Olympiad draws down, the Rio 2016 organizers can proudly claim that despite comments by a xenophobic and chauvinistic Western media, the Games were held successfully, as planned and as promised, on time and without any serious glitch or security issue, other than what would be expected of any major international event.
All credit for the successful hosting of the Olympics should go to members of the Rio 2016 organizing committee headed by Carlos Nuzman, and to the thousands of volunteers who worked diligently, before and during the Games, to ensure its resounding success. The sourpuss Western media will now probably have to wait for the next event in a developing country to once again begin spewing their spite.