It’s been a while since we checked in on Brazil’s $3.3 billion in new stadiums that it built for last year’s World Cup, several of them in cities without major teams to play in them once the big event was done. Now NPR has taken a look, and oh dear:
The most expensive World Cup stadium — located in the capital, Brasilia, and with a price tag of $550 million — is being used as a parking lot for buses.
Oh dear, oh dear:
The stadium in Cuiaba — which cost some $215 million to build — has made news repeatedly: first for being closed down because of faulty construction, and then recently for the homeless people squatting in its unused locker rooms.
Well, at least that’s only two—
The stadium in Natal is trying to make money by hosting weddings and kids’ parties — with little luck.
Brazil spent about $15 billion on the World Cup overall, and the government has long since given up pretending that it was worth it. (Especially when the defining moment of the tournament itself was Brazil’s team getting embarrassed by Germany.) The 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio, though, those are surely going to be awesome, because nothing ever goes wrong for countries that host the Olympics.
Even the often lauded infrastructure projects that supposedly come along with these events were never even completed in order to accommodate the surge of tourists, so there’s not even a tourist infrastructure left behind. I can’t see, with so little time left on the clock, how the Rio Olympics can turn it around on its own project time line. Atleast one thing can be said for the number of hilarious stadium projects in America; we atleast wouldn’t have to build them to accommodate such events.
See, see, stadiums *do* benefit the community!
But yeah, this is entirely predictable. Has anyone in Russia suggested converting Olympic facilities in Sochi into stray dog shelters?
The longer I live in Brasil the more layers of the idiotic onion peel away….I wonder when complete societal collapse will occur…….It cant be too far off.
It warms my heart to see the backlash against Boston 2024 and the lack of bids for future Winter Olympics. Looks like we have farther to go with FIFA, seeing that near-slave labor will build a half dozen stadiums in the desert for Qatar ’22.