February, 2012. Newly-built housing complex Mangueira II, right, where over 200 families from the Favela do Metro shantytown will move in. Victor R. Caivano /Press Association. All rights reserved. The opening of Rio’s Olympic Village, on July 24, just two weeks before the beginning of the 2016 Summer Games sparked considerable criticism of the state of athletes’ accommodations. Reports of missing lights on staircases, gas leaks, dirty rooms and hallways, and unfinished facilities abounded in all four corners of the gated condominium comprised of thirty-one 17-story towers.
Citing blocked toilets, leaking pipes and exposed wiring, the Australian delegation initially refused to move in to the Village, and checked into a hotel for two nights. The infrastructural crisis almost gave way to a diplomatic one, when Rio’s major Eduardo Paes commented he would get a kangaroo to jump around in the grounds of the Athletes’ Village if it would make Australians feel more at home. Australia’s response: “we do not need kangaroos, we need plumbers”.
Paes’ surreally off-key comment and the conflicts it unleashed dominated the media coverage of the incident. But after a taskforce of plumbers and hundreds of other construction workers set out to establish suitable conditions for the athletes, the subject gave way to appraisals of the opening ceremony and finally to the Games themselves.
