As the Olympics move to Rio, do you have any questions for the Guardian’s Latin America correspondent? Photograph: Guardian
Rio 2016 Olympics: our Latin America correspondent answers your questions – live!
In the meantime, here is Jonathan writing about “Brazil’s promise to provide an Olympics like no other”.
Rio de Janeiro’s 700m-long Sambadrome promises to be one hell of a party venue. For four nights each southern summer, the city’s samba schools parade here in a spectacular contest of music, colour and dancing. Today, however, it is being revamped for a still bigger festival and a very different series of competitions, as Brazil’s “City of Marvels” gears up for one of the most intense bursts of international sport, partying and – many locals fear – chaos in history.
Tonight Rio will receive the Olympic torch as the host of the 2016 Games, the first to be held in South America. Two years from now, the city will stage the World Cup. Organisers hope these two mega-events will transform the city, charm the world and highlight Brazil’s diversity and achievements.
An eight-minute taste of what to expect will be revealed this evening when hundreds of dancers, singers and musicians will try to capture the spirit of the Sambadrome during the Rio segment of London’s closing ceremony. The city’s mayor, Eduardo Paes, who will take the torch from Boris Johnson, has vowed 2016 will be an Olympics like no other.
Brazil is planning to spend £13bn on public transport, construction and urban renewal projects – half as much again as London spent on its Games, but less than half the amount invested by Beijing.
Busted: Belarus shot-putter Nadzeya Ostapchuk was stripped of her gold medal by the IOC on Monday for doping. AP
Shot winner caught doping
Performers wave the British flag during the Closing Ceremony at the 2012 Summer Olympics, Sunday, Aug. 12, 2012, in London. Photo: Sergei Grits / AP
Social media proves a force in consuming Olympics
The London Olympics may well be remembered as the event that drove home the power of social media — partly to the chagrin but mostly to the benefit of NBC, which controlled images of the games in the United States.
Twitter estimates there were more than 50 million tweets about the Olympics, at a pace of 80,000 per minute after Jamaica’s Usain Bolt won the gold medal in the 200-meter sprint. Facebook saw the number of fans of Olympic athletes soar: American gymnast Gabby Douglas had 14,358 followers on July 27 and 540,174 less than two weeks later.
All of the activity pumped up interest in the games. NBC executives privately anticipated the London games would have a smaller audience than the Beijing Olympics of 2008. Instead, the network’s prime-time audience averaged 31.1 million people a night through Saturday, up 12 percent from Beijing.
Many factors surely drove interest, like compelling competition and the amount of coverage available on TV and online. Maybe a recession-weary world wanted a collective, uplifting experience. But the explosion of social media is the one big change in the media landscape that would explain the increased ratings, said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project.
Facebook had 100 million users four years ago and has 900 million now.
Members of the British army at Eton Dorney, the venue of the London 2012 Olympic Games rowing events. Photograph: Peter Morgan/AP
Army warns Olympic Games recovery will take two years
Military faces big task to get back to normal, says planning chief, after deploying 18,000 troops to London 2012 duties
The armed forces will take two years to recover from their involvement in the Olympic Games because so many personnel have been deployed at short notice and taken away from normal duties, the military’s chief planner for the Games has said.
In an interview with the Guardian, Wing Commander Peter Daulby also warned that critics who wanted a smaller military put the country at risk of not being able to cope with these kind of civil emergencies, or a “national strategic shock”.
Daulby, who was put in charge of the military’s Olympic planning 18 months ago, said the need to send thousands of extra troops to the Games at the last minute after the G4S debacle showed “the country needs a military for more than war fighting”.
Describing the Olympics as the largest peacetime operation ever performed by the armed forces, he said: “It just shows you the dangers of pulling the military down. I am sure that there are some people who think that if we are a smaller military power we will be less likely to get involved in international operations.
“If we shrink the military, do we really understand what we are losing? Look at the speed with which we pushed up the throttle. It proves the military offers the country a huge amount of resilience.”
Daulby, 45, was one of several senior officers who spoke to the Guardian about the military’s contribution to the Olympics, which increased more than threefold from May last year.
Then, only 5,000 personnel were expected to be deployed, but that increased to 18,000 when the Olympic organisers Locog admitted they had significantly underestimated the number of security guards needed at the venues – and G4S conceded it had over-estimated its ability to recruit and train the extra staff.
he rush to train and get everyone ready meant “we were building the plane at the same time as flying the plane”, he said.
“We did not think that it would be healthy for the Olympic Games to be too militarised. Our fears were not well founded. It has been an enhancing experience.”
Brigadier Richard Smith said the scale and difficulty of the military’s role in London 2012 was comparable to operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“In terms of threat it is not comparable, but in terms of scale it is more than comparable. The complexity of the basing and the training to get them to task … it’s been a massive operation in a short space of time.
“In Iraq and in Helmand, we could build up over time and establish ourselves. For this we had a short space of time and we had to get it right first time.”
Location of the Liancourt Rocks in the Sea of Japan (East Sea) between South Korea and Japan. Source: Wikipedia
This week in South Korean island-related political stunts
Posted By Joshua Keating
It’s been a week of high-profile political stunts surrounding the disputed volcanic islands that are known in Korea as Dokdo, in Japan as Takeshima, but will be referred to for the purposes of this post as the Liancourt Rocks. Last Friday, Lee Myung-bak — gearing up for a presidential election in December — became the first South Korean president to ever visit the rocks, prompting Tokyo to recall its ambassador from Seoul.
Then, things spilled over onto the football pitch when South Korea defeated Japan in Friday’s bronze-medal match:
The International Olympic Committee is temporarily withholding a bronze medal from a South Korean football player who displayed a political sign after a win against Japan.
Midfielder Park Jong-woo brandished a banner referring to islands claimed by both South Korea and Japan.
The IOC barred him from taking part in Saturday’s medal ceremony.
Now, a group of South Koreans are swimming to the Liancourts:
More than 40 South Koreans have begun a relay swim of more than 200km (124 miles) to islands also claimed by Japan amid a serious diplomatic row between the two neighbours.
The team of swimmers, led by South Korean singer Kim Jang-hoon, plan to reach the islands on Wednesday, which marks the anniversary of the country’s liberation from Japan in 1945.
“Dokdo belongs to the Republic of Korea, so we will shout, ‘Go for it with the Republic of Korea,’” Mr Kim told reporters before the swim began.
As if that wasn’t enough:
In another apparent statement on the islands, South Korea has also revealed plans to name a group of spindle trees on the island as a national monument, Yonhap news agency reports.
There are only two permanent residents on the islands — an elderly Korean fisherman and his wife — but there are potential energy deposits in the area, not to mention national pride at stake. This week’s gestures are actually fairly mild. In 2005, after a Japanese prefecture declared a “Takeshima day,” a South Korean mother and son sliced off their fingers outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul to protest.
The USSR would have dominated this Olympics
Posted By Joshua Keating
Vladimir Putin once famously said that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. That may not be true, but from the Kremlin’s point of view, it was inarguably an Olympic catastrophe.
Russia finished the 2012 Olympics with a respectable 82 total medals (putting it in third place behind the U.S. and China) and 24 golds (putting it in fourth behind Britain). But what if things had turned out differently in the early 1990s and the Soviet Union were still intact? Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus all put in strong showings at the games. In fact, 13 of the 15 former Soviet states got at least one medal, including just the third ever* for tiny Tajikistan. (Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan failed to medal.)
If you add up all 13 countries you get 163 medals — well ahead of the U.S. total of 104. The USSR would have been awarded 46 golds — tied with the red, white, and blue. With 16.9 percent of the total medals, the hypothetical Soviet Union would have nearly tied the real Soviet Union’s haul of 17.8 percent in 1988.
Pobyeda!
(It would have been an indisputable victory if Belarusian shot-putter Nadzeya Ostapchuk hadn’t been stripped of her medal after testing positive for an anabolic steroid today.)
Back in the world of currently existing countries, the Olympic prediction models I wrote aboutbefore the games all had the correct top 4, though China and Britain got many more medals than expected. Australia, which normally punches above its weight at the games, was probably the biggest surprise on the negative end.
*Correction, Aug. 13, 2012: The original post incorrectly stated that Tajikistan won its first medal at this year’s Olympics. It actually won two at the 2008 Olympics.
Tahmina Kohistani, the only female athlete representing Afghanistan, after competing in the 100-metres at the 2012 Olympic Games in London, Aug. 3, 2012.
(JED JACOBSOHN/NYT)
These Olympics are a giant leap for women everywhere
Like many of you, every four years I am bitten by the Olympics bug. I am caught up in the beauty of the Games. Young athletes, dedicated to hard work and a dream, have gathered to compete. And this time all of us really are together on the same stage.
For the first time in the history of the Games, every participating country has sent a woman as part of its delegation. It’s also the first time that women can medal in virtually all the same events as men.
Really, they are the bigger story at these Olympics. More than 3,000 of the athletes at these Games – almost a third – are Muslims.
Countries where women can’t drive or go outside after dark without a male escort have sent their daughters and sisters and wives to represent them on the world’s biggest stage. Brunei, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, where I lived for 10 years, have all sent women athletes for the first time. It is something an eight-year-old me could never have imagined in Jeddah.
Despite the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power and the military’s tight grip on Egypt, the country has sent 34 female athletes to the Games.
From war-ravaged Afghanistan, many parts of which are still controlled by the Taliban, a brave Tahmina Kohistani is sprinting for her country.
And many of these female athletes from the developing world made it to the Olympics without major sponsors and with less-than-state-of-the-art training facilities. Determination and pushing the boundaries of patriarchy got them there.
When the two female athletes from Saudi Arabia entered the Olympic stadium, a Twitter user referred to them as the “prostitutes of the Olympics.” Wojdan Shaherkani went to compete in judo. There were lengthy negotiations about modifying her hijab, which her country insisted she wear, and the IOC relented. Even then the naysayers and the hardliners weren’t happy. She was accused of being dishonourable because she fought in front of men. Saudi television did not broadcast her fight. And while she may have lost her first match, her loss was a victory for a much greater fight.
Whether you agree with her wearing of the hijab or not, Ms. Shaherkani’s presence at the Games matters. And maybe some day, many years from now, when her daughter is competing at the Olympics, she may know what a giant leap her mother took for all of us.
The Olympic Games are about more than individual athletes; they are about what we value as a global community. When countries that still believe women are second-class citizens send those women to represent them, it is a moment of real honour – and the first step in a marathon for change.
Natasha Fatah is a Toronto-based writer.
Scott Halleran/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
President Danilo Turk of Slovenia, center, posing with national team athletes in the Olympic Village in London last month.
Slovenia Leads Games in Medals Per Capita
Once again, the United States, China and, to a lesser degree, Russia, are battling to become the nation with the biggest haul of Olympic medals. That is no surprise: their teams have the best resources – training facilities and so on – to produce athletes like Michael Phelps and a raft of Michael Jordan-like badminton and table tennis players.
What is perhaps more compelling are the nations that carry their weight in medals, like Slovenia. The Slovenes have won four medals: gold in judo, silver in track and field and bronze in rowing and shooting. With a population of 2.06 million people, that works out to one medal per 514,385 residents, the best per-capita medal rate among the 59 countries that have won at least one medal through Sunday.
New Zealand (seven medals, or one per 633,231 residents), Jamaica (four medals, or one per 676,456 residents) and Denmark and Australia round out the top five.
The Chinese had the most total medals (61 so far), but on a per-capita basis, they ranked 48th, or one medal per 22,087,704 residents. That put them ahead of Mexico (five medals) and behind Spain (three medals).
The United States ranked 36th (60 medals, or one per 5,223,033 people), ahead of Greece (two medals) and behind Singapore (one medal).
The biggest laggard was India, which has just three medals and a population of 1.24 billion, or one medal per 413,830,653 people. The next nearest nation was Indonesia, which has won two medals, or one per 118,820,663 people.
Ready, set, go: Oscar Pistorius makes history in 400m heats Photo: AFP
Oscar Pistorius second in 400m heats as he becomes first double amputee to compete in the Olympics
Oscar Pistorius has broken new ground with every stride of his carbon-fibre blades, but the most precious steps of all were the ones that took him into the London Olympic Stadium on Saturday morning.
The South African has collected four Paralympic gold medals and a world championship silver medal in an inspirational career, but the title that mattered most was that of Olympian.
On Saturday morning, at 10.31am, he earned the right to use it. Pistorius appeared in the first heat of the 400m and qualified for Sunday night’s semi-final, which is the limit of his ambition in London, but he has already redefined the notion of “taking part”.
Emerging onto the track under the cover of Jessica Ennis’s appearance in the long jump, he bounced onto the track and joined his competitors
for the start of the opening heat of the men’s 400m.
It took a moment for the crowd to notice that the man in lane six was different to his rivals. Only when he essayed a start and sprung from his blocks to jog the first bend did the penny drop that the ‘blade runner’ was in the building.
Oscar Pistorius, shown here in 2008 after running in the 400 meters of the Dutch Open Paralympics, will compete in the individual 400 meters and the 4×400-meter relay in London. Photo: Peter Dejong/AP
Bigger, Faster, Stronger: Will Bionic Limbs Put the Olympics to Shame?
On Euston Road in London, about seven miles from where Oscar Pistorius will run in the Olympics atop legs of carbon fiber, is the Wellcome Collection, home to an array of science-based exhibits reflecting the influences of art, history and other aspects of the humanities. One of its current features is titledSuperhuman.
The show explores human enhancement of all types, with an eye toward what the future of biological augmentation might bring. It’s artsy, occasionally whimsical and very forward-thinking — and on point with regard to Pistorius’ competing in these Olympics and a sign of how future Games may change.
We’ve heard all about Pistorius, the South African sprinter born without fibulas, who wears prosthetics called Flex-Foot Cheetahs that allow him to compete not just with disabled runners, but with the best able-bodied sprinters on the planet.
His presence at the Games has sparked considerable debate. Do his prosthetics give him an unfair advantage, as some still argue, or do their limitations — not to mention his incomplete lower-body musculature, which forces him to compensate with muscle groupings elsewhere — level the competitive balance? For an example of how divergent opinions are, look no further than the team that helped overturn the 2007 ban laid down on Pistorius by the International Association of Athletic Federations, which had prevented him from competing at the Olympic level.
Pistorius is physiologically the same as other athletes, they argued in a paper published in the Journal of Applied Physiology (.pdf), even if he’s mechanically different. The Court of Arbitration in Sport agreed, and the IAAF relented; in 2008, his ban was overturned, although he did not meet the Olympic qualifying time for Beijing and ran in the Paralympics instead.
It appears that the paper’s authors have traveled divergent paths from that point.
“The lightness of Pistorius’ limbs make him 15 to 20 percent, or more, faster than he would otherwise be,” the paper’s lead author, Peter Weyand, an associate professor of applied physiology and biomechanics at Southern Methodist University, told Wired. “He can reposition his limbs” — in other words, stride — “20 to 25 percent faster than intact-limb runners who have the same top speed … and 16 percent faster than five world record-holders in the 100 meters.” Weyand says that Pistorius’ blades can augment his 400 time by as much as eight seconds. (Read an expanded form of his argument here.
American Allison Schmitt reacts to her gold-medal victory.
SCHMITT WINS 200 FREE; FRANKLIN 4TH
Champions … China’s men’s artistic gymnastics team celebrate their victory.Source: AFP
China wins men’s artistic gymnastic team gold medal
China took team gold in the men’s artistic gymnastic team competition to become the first country since Japan in Montreal 1976 to win the event at successive Olympic Games.
Japan finished second after lodging a protest, relegating original silver medallist Great Britain to third place for their first Olympic medal in gymnastics for 90 years.
The Chinese team of Feng Zhe, Zhang Chenglong, Zou Kai, Chen Yibing and Gou Weiyang finished well clear of the rest of the eight-team field with a winning total of 275.997 points.
Ukraine, initially on bronze, were pushed back to fourth because of the protest, while the much-fancied United States team never recovered from a disastrous performance on the pommel horse, finishing back in fifth place.
China’s Ye Shiwen competes in the women’s 200m individual medley heats on Monday, when she said ‘the Chinese team keep very firmly to the anti-doping policies’. Photograph: Christophe Simon/AFP/Getty Images
Ye Shiwen’s world record Olympic swim ‘disturbing’, says top US coach
• Chinese 16-year-old who swam faster than Ryan Lochte compared to East Germans
• John Leonard says gold medal time was ‘not believable to many people’
