The Games That Kept Going

The president wasn't there. Dilma Rousseff had been suspended in May and would be removed from office on the last day of the month. The World Health Organization had declared a public health emergency over a mosquito-borne virus linked to babies born with undersized skulls. Brazil was in its worst recession in something like eighty years, and the organizing committee had spent the preceding months trying to cut half a billion dollars out of an operating budget of under two billion. More than a hundred heads of state had been expected. About fifty came.

And the ceremony was beautiful.

That's the part people don't quite know what to do with, then or now. It would be a cleaner story if Rio 2016 had been a hollow, gaudy, obviously-compensating spectacle — the kind of thing you can dismiss on the way to the actual news. It wasn't. Fernando Meirelles, Daniela Thomas and Andrucha Waddington made something genuinely good, and they made it for about six and a half million dollars, roughly a tenth of what London had spent four years earlier. Deborah Colker choreographed six thousand volunteers. A hundred and ten projectors turned the stadium floor into a living surface because there was no money for anything else.

So hold both. The show was excellent. The situation behind it was catastrophic. Those two facts are not in tension. They are the same fact, viewed from different seats, and the mechanism connecting them is one you run in your own life often enough that you've stopped noticing.

i · the budget was the confession

Meirelles said, in the run-up, that he would have been ashamed to waste what London spent — that with Brazil's schools and hospitals in the state they were in, extravagance would have been obscene. Read that as sincere, because it almost certainly was. Then read it again.

There is a move every human being knows how to make, usually without deciding to. You lose the thing you can't afford, and rather than sit in the loss, you reframe it as a value. You didn't fail to get the money. You chose restraint. You're not scrambling; you're minimalist. The reframe is not a lie — Meirelles' objection to spending was real, and the argument was correct — but the reframe's timing is the tell. The principle arrived exactly when the budget left.

What makes Rio interesting rather than pathetic is that the reframe worked. The constraint made the art better. Denied pyrotechnics, they made projection and human bodies carry the whole night, and the result was warmer and stranger and more specific than the fully funded version would have been. Scarcity forced them into originality because luxury was off the table.

This is the honest, uncomfortable middle of the thing: coping mechanisms are not fake. They frequently produce your best work. The story you told yourself to survive the year you couldn't afford your life might have been the story that made you interesting. That doesn't mean it was true when you started telling it. Both. Always both.

ii · the truth was part of the costume

The ceremony did not paper over Brazil's history. The opening sequence walked the audience through the Amazon and its indigenous peoples — seventy-two dancers drawn from the Parintins festival associations — then through Portuguese colonization, then through African slavery, then through Arab and Japanese immigration. It did not skip the slavery. It put it in front of the world at the top of the night.

Then a long segment on anthropogenic climate change, narrated by Fernanda Montenegro and Judi Dench, using Ed Hawkins' temperature-spiral visualization and animated sea levels rising over Amsterdam, Dubai, Lagos, Shanghai, and Rio itself. An Olympic opening ceremony told several billion people that the coastline they were watching would be underwater.

Then the favelas, on the main stage — Elza Soares, Ludmilla, Marcelo D2, samba and funk carioca in the center of the frame rather than sanitized out of it. Then the Refugee Olympic Team walked in and received the loudest ovation of the night after Brazil's own. Then Lea T, the first widely known transgender person to take part in an Olympic opening ceremony, leading delegations into the stadium.

Every one of those choices was admirable. Every one of them was also true.

And the obvious next move — the one I want to make and won't — is to say they were therefore camouflage. That reading is available for every ceremony ever staged, which is exactly what's wrong with it. Cover slavery and the climate and you've deployed distant truths as misdirection. Cover Zika and the impeachment and you've staged sanctioned dissent, safely aestheticized. Cover nothing and you've evaded. A frame that survives all possible evidence isn't an argument. It's a mood.

Start instead with the genre baseline, which is unglamorous and clarifying: no Olympic opening ceremony has ever addressed the host government's live political crisis. Not one. That's not a plot, it's the form. And forms select. A ceremony is paid for by the parties whose present conduct constitutes the near truth, which means distant truths are free and near ones are the only material that costs the payer anything. The eighteenth century has no representative in the room. Neither does 2100. You don't need a conspiracy to explain why the free material wins. You need a budget.

Nobody handed Meirelles a list of forbidden subjects. He was an artist working on a tenth of London's money for a committee that was hemorrhaging its own. The selection happened above him and without instructions, which is how selection usually happens.

So the question isn't why Rio omitted the near truth. Every host does. It's what Rio did instead, which was stranger and worse.

iii · the near truth had a number

Between 2009 and 2015, by Rio's own City Hall accounting presented in July 2015, 22,059 families were removed from their homes in the city — 77,206 people. Not all of that was Olympic; the mega-event decade included the World Cup and a great deal of ordinary urban clearance. But the Popular Committee for the World Cup and Olympics, compiling the city's figures alongside its own fieldwork, counted at least 4,120 families displaced for reasons directly or indirectly tied to the Olympic project, with 2,486 more still under threat of removal. They published it in a dossier called Rio 2016 Olympics: The Exclusion Games, in November 2015 — nine months before the ceremony, in English, free to download.

Then Elza Soares sang, and funk carioca held the center of the frame, and several billion people watched the culture of the favela celebrated on the main stage of the apparatus that was clearing it.

That is not a distant truth standing in for a near one. That is the near truth itself, put in costume and sold back to the people it was taken from. It's the sharpest thing in the whole ceremony and it went out live.

The money has the same shape. Odebrecht — Brazil's largest construction firm, and by 2016 a central figure in Operation Car Wash — took half of all Olympic contracts by value and worked on eight of the ten largest projects. In March 2016, five months before the ceremony and on the front page, federal police drew two Olympic-linked builds into the investigation: the Line 4 metro extension running to the Olympic Park, and the Marvelous Port redevelopment. Internal company emails suggested cash payments on both.

Which answers the objection this kind of argument usually deserves. The near truth in Rio wasn't unknowable, or contested, or sitting in a sealed file awaiting a future historian. It was in the newspapers before the volunteers finished rehearsing, and in a downloadable PDF nine months early. It was reachable. The ceremony reached for the eighteenth century and the twenty-second instead.

Now, there's a version of this I could hand you here about self-disclosure and dinner parties — how the confession is the camouflage, how the most disarming sentence you said this year was probably the one that ended a conversation before it reached the thing you couldn't discuss. That's true, and it's the same move the ceremony made, and you should notice that it costs you nothing. It's a real, admirable, verifiable insight aimed comfortably inward, and it would sit down in exactly the seat where a nearer and more expensive one goes.

The nearer one: those numbers were public for nine months, in your language, and the reason you're meeting them for the first time in the eleventh paragraph of an essay about set design is not that anybody hid them.

iv · the twelve seconds

At 23:27, Michel Temer — acting president, seven weeks into a job he had not been elected to — declared the Games of the XXXI Olympiad open. It took one sentence. The stadium booed him.

He had not been introduced at the beginning of the ceremony. He was not introduced at the end. The producers of the most carefully staged evening in the country's recent history had quietly routed the head of state out of their own program, leaving him a single required line and no cover. And in the twelve seconds it took him to say it, the entire apparatus failed.

Or it worked perfectly.

Both readings come out of the same twelve seconds, and the honest position is that you cannot tell them apart from inside the stadium. In the first, the frame holding four hours of grace and light briefly could not contain the room, and the thing everyone already knew got into the building. In the second, a hundred thousand hours of rehearsed composure gave the room's rage a twelve-second window and exactly one unelected man to aim it at, and then closed. Temer governed for two and a half more years. Catharsis is not a routing failure. A valve releasing pressure is a valve doing its job, and the valve is part of the design.

What's true in either version is that the boo was not information. Nobody in that stadium learned anything at 23:27 they hadn't known at 20:00. The crisis had been public for months; so had the dossier. This is what actually happens when a performance breaks, or performs breaking. It is almost never a revelation. It is a fact that everybody involved already possessed, arriving somewhere it wasn't supposed to go — and being handled. The dinner party where somebody says the quiet thing isn't a disclosure; it's a routing failure, and the reason the room recovers so fast is that the room already knew.

v · what the cauldron knew

They lit two flames that night.

The main cauldron was deliberately small — low-emission by design, a rebuke to the pillars of fire of previous Games — and it was mounted in front of a twelve-meter kinetic sculpture by Anthony Howe, a spinning mirrored disc that caught the modest flame and threw it back multiplied. A small real fire, amplified by a machine built to reflect it. The most literal object in the history of Olympic set design, and it went by as set dressing.

The second flame, at Candelária Plaza, was lit by a fourteen-year-old named Jorge Gomes from Rio's Olympic education program — in the square where, in 1993, police killed eight street children.

And the man they chose for the main cauldron was Vanderlei Cordeiro de Lima, who is famous for one thing. In Athens in 2004, leading the Olympic marathon, he was tackled off the course by a spectator, lost the lead, and finished anyway, in third. He is not famous for winning. He is famous for being interrupted and continuing.

They handed the flame to a man whose entire public meaning is kept going after something knocked him out of the race. In a stadium in a country that was, that week, being knocked out of the race. Ten years later it reads less like symbolism and more like a confession the organizers may not have known they were making.

The Games went on. They always do. The show is never more necessary than when the situation behind it is worst, which is precisely why a magnificent performance should be read as a symptom rather than a verdict. The measure of a life is not the quality of the ceremony. Some of the best evenings anyone ever staged were staged by people who could not afford to stop moving.

So the question the Maracanã leaves you with isn't whether you're performing. Of course you are; the alternative to performance isn't authenticity, it's catatonia. The question is narrower and worse: the true, admirable, entirely defensible things you lead with — who pays for the seat directly behind them?

In Rio the answer has a number attached. Four thousand one hundred and twenty families, at minimum. It was published nine months before the projectors arrived, and the ceremony was still the best thing on television that year.