Rio Olympics: Halfway point

By Ed Piper

At the halfway point of the two-week Rio Olympics, I have already experienced much joy in viewing events over the past 10 days from the heat (last week was pretty warm in our place in Clairemont) and coolness of our living room couch, then yesterday from our newly placed leather chair in front of our smaller dining room boob tube.

Simone Biles created art in her better-than-promised gymnastics performances. (Aly Raisman, her teammate and silver medalist in the all-around, was sublime, too, in the floor exercise.) The Michael Phelps story, with his recovery seemingly moving him to new maturity and gold-medal swims at the age of 31, has warmed everybody's hearts.

Katie Ledecky has shown superhuman strokes in winning the 8,000-meter freestyle in world record time by 11 seconds or so over the silver medalist. Her modesty and honesty--so refreshing in this day of smug and swelled-headed athletes--have made her feats that much more pleasureable.

All of this, despite the media reports leading up to the 2016 Games of gloom-and-doom. Don't get me wrong--gloom-and-doom stories have their place. If I had been a journalist assigned to go to Rio de Janeiro and gather information for news articles prior to the sports events, I, too, would have been obligated by journalistic integrity to report on the floating couches in Guanabara Bay, the unprocessed sewage, the body parts washing ashore, as well as President Dilma Rousseff's suspension from duties, favelas being bulldozed to make room for Maracana Stadium's renovation, and other social/political stories.

But when I was assigned to cover the Pan American Games in Mexico City, where I had just moved, in fall 1976, my editor only asked me to cover the sports events--not the social issues. And I did so, limited by my English and one month of Spanish I had had time to pick up when I wasn't teaching English Language Arts at my private secondary school in the posh Lomas area of the Federal District. I covered the torch relay at the Opening Ceremonies, basketball, and other sports, whatever filled up 51 hours of reporting over that two-week period.

Still, the floating bacteria and body parts don't block out the sheer fun of watching golf (which I'm not even into), in the Olympics for the first time in 112 years, the fabulous 10,000-meter run by Almaz Ayana of Ethiopia yesterday, only her second time ever running the event, breaking the world record by an unheard-of 14 seconds, even capybaras roaming on the links course (though I've only seen photos of the massive rodents on news sites, not on NBC Olympic coverage).

It took me a week to figure out why these Olympics were so different for me, piling up untold hours of viewing on 10 different television channels: I've never watched an Olympics when I was retired before. The open time I have has caused me to find other things to do some days, just to break the many hours of couch-potatoing I have been doing.

As mentioned previously, I have visited Rio and have seen the favelas, the towering Christ the Redeemer statue, gone shopping in the ritzy Barra da Tijuca neighborhood. The father of Frederico, our foreign exchange student my mother and I were visiting, was worried during our stay that someone would do what they reportedly still do today: if we rented a car (which we didn't do), blocking our vehicle in front and behind so that we couldn't race off, then robbing us at gunpoint.

Natercio and Frederico's mother, Maria Carmen, hosted us for the first week of the trip in their comfortable flat in Leblon, near Copacabana and Barra. In his real concern for our well-being, Natercio wished we wouldn't venture out.

But having traveled the length of the globe north to south, we didn't come to sit in someone's living room. We bought BrazilPasses, an incredibly cheap (this was 1988) $250 each, which entitled us to fly to Bahia/Salvador, Brasilia, the national capital, and Foc de Iguacu, site of the enormous Niagara-like falls at the junction of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay. We have a memorable time. Frederico shepherded us around. It was a wonderful visit.

I lived a year in Mexico City prior to our Brazil vacation, so I was used to being the tall Gringo who stands out. Someone sprayed mustard on the back of my jacket in Bahia (Salvador), a city in the northeast of Brazil, while my mother and I were looking at a map at a corner newsstand. That didn't damage anyone, though--probably just a show of disgust at a foreign tourist being there. No big deal.

Also in Bahia, a young man tied a ribbon around my wrist, the ribbon reading "Lembranca do Salvador" (remembrance of Salvador--a souvenir), then demanding money. I think we gave him a small coin, then Frederico said let's go and we got back on the city bus.

When you travel, these things can happen. You either overlook these minor inconveniences and focus on the overall joy of seeing other cultures, or you get bogged down and probably should stay home.