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After the Spotlight: Rio 2016’s Post-Olympic Legacy

Year: 2025
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Beyond the internationally visible two weeks of the Olympic Games competition, the cities that host an event undergo years-long preparation and the impacts on a city’s landscape last long after the Games have concluded. Hosting the Olympics has the potential to leave a lasting legacy through urban transformation and new sports venues, but it comes with financial and reputational risks to the host city and country. In this thesis, I studied Rio de Janeiro’s 2016 Olympic bid, planning process, and ongoing legacy. Through this research, I evaluated how Rio 2016’s sports venue and infrastructure promises compared to their execution, how Brazil’s shifting economic and political climate impacted those projects, and what we can learn from Rio to apply to organizing future mega-events. While Rio’s successful bid was lauded in 2009 as a significant first for all of South America, coming during an economic boom and along several other mega-events in Brazil, Brazil’s political and economic situation changed drastically between 2009 and 2016. Grand plans for new venues and large-scale infrastructure projects were toned down or faced delays due to political turmoil from the arrests of high-level officials in the Lava Jato corruption probe and economic difficulties from the Brazilian financial crisis from 2014 to 2016. In the immediate post-Olympic era, international publications widely criticized Rio’s Olympic legacy, but was that the whole story? I wanted to know if Rio’s Olympic Organizing Committee and government accomplished what they set out to do after media attention had turned to the next big event. I investigated a more complete story that outlined how each original plan and traced its outcome, adding a present-day perspective rarely found in the media outside of Brazil. This research is important to offer a comprehensive understanding of the expectations compared to realities over the lifecycle of Rio’s Olympic bid, organizing, and legacy. Additionally, lessons learned from Rio can be applied to future mega-event bids to create Olympic bids that better map to a host’s economic, political, and sporting contexts. I argue that judging how plans compare to realities for Olympic legacy projects requires an evaluation over time that considers the shifting economic, political, and social contexts of the host city.
DOI: 10.17615/cd4e-bn63
Author: Romine, Olivia
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W6906521403
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