The Olympics were a ‘success,’ but only if the Olympics are the only thing you care about

The world has flown home from Rio. By this point, even the Solomon Islands Olympic team, which I met in an airport in Chile Monday, is probably on the fifth and final leg of their journey from Rio-to-Santiago-to-Auckland-to-Adelaide-to-Honiara, their country’s capital. And the Olympics — by which I mean the two-week sporting event that just happened in Brazil, and nothing else — were a success.

The games were undeniably great. With dynamic, captivating performances, Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt proved for one final Olympiad that they are the greatest athletes in the history of their respective sports. Katie Ledecky and Simone Biles set new standards for unparalleled brilliance. It was a great Olympiad for America — topping the medal count with 121 medals, 51 more than any other country.

And it was a great Olympiad for the hosts Brazil, who won more overall medals and more golds than in any other Olympics. They didn’t just win random events, they took gold in three marquee events hugely popular with Brazilians — soccer, beach volleyball and indoor volleyball. The national anthem describes “the resounding cry of a heroic folk,” and it was genuinely awe-inspiring to be in Brazilian arenas as the Brazilian flag was raised and beaming Brazilians belted out those words.

There were many concerns before the Olympics, but the Olympiad has come and gone without many of them coming to fruition. There were worries about Brazil’s rampant street crime, but of course, the most prominent example of Olympic-related crime was fictional.

There were concerns about the Zika virus, but no athletes were reported as becoming symptomatic during the games. In fact, it was hard to find any mosquitoes — except in my hotel room, where the damn things set up shop. There were concerns about the water quality threatening aquatic athletes — rowers, sailors and open water swimmers — but there were no reports about any of these athletes suffering water-borne sicknesses during the games.

We were told the venues wouldn’t be built, but everything got into place in time. To be honest, the venues were quite beautiful. The Olympic park, a cohesive cluster of brand new arenas, was legitimately striking.

The new subway line servicing the games opened only a few days before the opening ceremony, but everybody who rode it agreed it was fine. The subway I rode in Rio was significantly cleaner and seemed to function better than the ones I take to work each day in New York.

My biggest fear — that Brazil would not be able to protect Olympic sites that had been targeted by international terrorists — turned out to be unfounded. Perhaps Brazil’s strategy of making heavily armed soldiers an omnipresent force throughout the Olympic areas successfully deterred would-be attackers. Perhaps there was never any threat at all. Either way, Brazil successfully secured the Olympics, so that everybody inside the perimeter could cheer and smile in safety.

After a lot of chatter that Brazil wasn’t up to the task of hosting the games, the biggest problem was that a pool turned green. It was a tad embarrassing that they failed at the science of Pool Maintenance your uncle Steve mastered in his backyard, but it was inconsequential. After the doom and gloom, the biggest mess-up was something to laugh about.

I couldn’t watch NBC’s coverage of the games since I was in Rio, but I was told that it highlighted Brazil’s beauty. In between the spectacular sports, viewers were treated to shots of Sugarloaf Mountain and the lovely Brazilian beaches. It was a gorgeous games in an idyllic land.

So let me tell you about something NBC couldn’t broadcast — not because they didn’t want to, but because there’s no technology for it. It’s a smell, a musty, gross odor I smelled it every time I approached a non-ocean body of water in Rio. It was the smell of sewage. I’ve smelled it here in New York — the Gowanus Canal is rank, y’all — but never on the pervasive level I smelled it in Rio. Often I would be on a bus with my head down typing, and the smell would alert me to the fact that the bus was driving alongside a canal.

Most of Rio is not connected to the city’s sanitation system. So most sewage goes untreated. And that untreated sewage goes into the rivers, lakes, lagoons and bays surrounding Rio.

Before the Olympics, this was mainly portrayed as a problem for the athletes whose bodies might briefly come into contact with the water. It wasn’t: They are all healthy, so far as we have been told. But living a lifetime amongst poop water has much greater implications than the smell tourists endured, or the potential brief illnesses athletes risked. It harms the health and lowers the quality of life for millions of Brazilians.

The hope was the Olympics would fix this. But while the stadiums and other Olympic projects got the money they needed, fixing the water never got the money it needed. There is now talk of fixing the bay 20 or 30 years from now. Talking to locals, they seem to feel that if the billion-dollar Olympics couldn’t be the thing to fix Rio’s water, nothing ever will.

Brazil genuinely deserves commendation for safely and effectively pulling off the monster feat that is the Olympics. But the games didn’t fix the problems of Brazil — and may have caused others.

No, no athletes got attacked. Let’s not think for a second that this means Brazil is a safe place. No athletes got attacked because of a very special set of circumstances meant to protect them: An omnipresent security force, and cops given license to extrajudicially kill their own citizens in the name of safety. Their legitimately criminal behavior is documented.

Lochte’s faux-robbery will probably make outsiders assume that street violence in Brazil is overplayed. It’s not. We told Ryan Lochte that Brazil’s very real crime problem primarily affected him, a wealthy American, and in his stupidity, he thought that meant it was a convenient solution to his own dumb problem. But the real problem is out there, and the Olympics have not helped it at all. The games merely allowed for the justification of legitimately criminal methods of policing while not actually solving the issues that cause crime. Don’t let the gold medal idiocy of America’s Handsome Swim Doofus distract you from that.

No, no athletes got Zika that we know of. But Zika was not seriously a problem for the actual Olympics. It is not a disease that causes life-threatening illness for adult humans. It is mainly a problem for people who are pregnant while infected with the disease.

I wore long sleeves and long pants for the entirety of the Olympics and applied hearty amounts of bug spray. But like I said, those damn things set up shop in my room. I got bitten several times by mosquitoes. And yesterday when I walked my dog in New York, I got another mosquito bite. That was the problem with Zika: Not that anybody would get sick during the games, but that people would carry the disease to their homelands and create new epidemics. If one of the bugs in my room carried Zika, I just carried it to a park where young moms take their kids to play.

To say the issue of the Zika virus was overblown before the Olympics would be premature. It will be months and years — and potentially thousands of ruined lives — before we know whether the Olympics aided the international spread of a horrible disease.

And the amount of money Brazil spent on these Olympics while in the midst of a financial crisis is ludicrous. They will never get that money back, and millions of the nation’s citizens lack for basic human necessities. No athletes or media died at the Olympics — a German coach died in a car crash — but people’s lives will be shorter and worse because Brazil spent money that should’ve been used to help its citizens on making sure the velodrome and canoe slalom course were ready.

You could only possibly believe the Olympics were a success if you willfully live in a world where only the Olympics matter. Luckily, the IOC has built such a world for themselves.

Before the Olympics, I heard people refer to the “Olympic bubble” that emerges in any host city, but I didn’t understand how complete it was. In Rio, the primary Olympic zone was in Barra, a relatively new, expensive area of town on the other side of a bunch of mountains from the areas we think of when we think of Rio. The view from the perimeter is not favelas, but high-rises and hills.

There was a shuttle system so that anybody involved with the games — athletes, media, national committee members — could get from Olympic place to Olympic place. IOC people got personal cars. These shuttles and cars were allowed access to special Rio 2016 lanes on the highway, allowing them to quickly and easily bypass Rio’s famously difficult traffic.

Access to these areas was made extremely difficult for regular humans. One night I tried Ubering home to the Olympic Media Village, only to find a) the address of the newly built compound didn’t pop up on the driver’s GPS and locals didn’t recognize the street name and b) the driver’s civilian car couldn’t get close, as he was rerouted away by police.

This isolation was planned, and at great inconvenience to the people of Brazil. Actual humans were displaced from their homes so the Olympic park could be built where it was, with a pleasant, poor people-free panorama. Actual humans had their already lengthy trips to work exacerbated so the officials and media in Rio 2016 lanes could speed by.

This is a bubble the IOC intentionally creates. It wanted Brazil to be the backdrop of these games without anybody seeing Brazil’s enormous problems, much less actually attempting to fix them.

It might have worked on TV, where NBC could segue from Katie Ledecky’s swim into a commercial with a shot of Cristo Redentor. But on the ground, there was the stink of Brazil’s real problems. The rain would fall, or the wind would blow, and the odor from the lagoon next to the Olympic park would waft over. They could create a bubble, but they could not keep out the stench of the things the IOC wanted the world to ignore.

IOC president Thomas Bach spent his time inside the bubble. In the closing ceremony, he ignored anything bad about the games, calling them a “marvelous games in the marvelous city” before quickly diverting our attention to Tokyo.

The IOC are parasites. They select a host. They arrive, take the resources they need to survive — money and international goodwill — and then move on to their next target.

They provide only one thing. They don’t build the stadiums, they don’t produce the television broadcasts, they certainly don’t provide solutions to any issues the country they select may face. All they have is the ability to say that your international sporting event was the Olympics, and not just an international sporting event.

As long as that stamp of approval is deemed valuable, the IOC will not change anything. They have no need to. In their world, where the Olympics are the only thing that matters, even this deeply problematic Olympiad was a profound success. They had a good time and made money, other people had a good time and paid money. If you asked IOC members the worst thing about Brazil, they’d probably say that the Rio 2016 lanes occasionally didn’t prevent them from sitting in traffic.

Those Olympic rings are supposed to be a symbol to be venerated. But let’s not forget what they actually are: A highly visible symptom of a bad infestation, the most obvious evidence that the parasites have selected you as their host.