RIO DE JANEIRO (REUTERS) – It has taken six years however Rio de Janeiro has lastly begun complying with one among its most publicised Olympic guarantees – to remodel one of many sporting venues into faculties.
Workers final week started rigorously dismantling the Handball Arena within the Olympic Park, the huge space that in 2016 hosted 16 Olympic occasions and 10 Paralympic ones, together with tennis, biking, swimming.
Engineers took down partitions and can quickly strip the electrics, hydraulics, pipes and inner dividing partitions from the venue the place the Danish males and Russian ladies received gold medals.
Other gear akin to lifts and air con models can even be repurposed to be used in 4 state faculties, every of which will probably be house to 245 college students.
All 4 new faculties will probably be in-built Rio’s West Zone, near the place many Olympic occasions befell.
The transformation plan was a lot vaunted by the town as a means of constructing the Rio Olympics – the primary to be held in South America – extra inclusive and socially accountable.
“All these Olympic structures were conceived to be easy to dismantle so that part, not all, of the material could be used to construct public schools,” Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes mentioned as he watched the preliminary deconstruction happen final week.
“It’s the first step in executing our Olympic Legacy Plan that was sidelined over the last few years.”
Paes estimated the transformation will take 18 months to complete. The close by area the place Michael Phelps received 5 golds is because of be imploded, with the metal bought off or used for different development initiatives, the town mentioned.
The motive for the virtually six-year delay is down largely to politics.
Paes left workplace in 2017 and the transformation program lay dormant underneath Marcelo Crivella, the right-wing mayor who ran Rio between 2017 and 2021.
The Olympic Park lay untended for a while after the Games ended and was even shuttered in 2020 by a decide who thought of the rotting amenities a hazard to the general public.
Paes was re-elected to succeed Crivella in 2020 and has made infrastructure one among his priorities.
The 52-year-old mayor was one of many few senior figures concerned within the Rio Olympic organisation to emerge comparatively unscathed from a sequence of corruption probes.
The head of each the Rio bid and the Brazilian Olympic Committee, Carlos Nuzman, was sentenced to greater than 30 years in jail final 12 months for cash laundering, corruption and different crimes related to vote-buying.
His right-hand man, former Rio 2016 director of operations Leonardo Gryner, was additionally convicted of collaborating to bribe IOC officers to swing the vote in Rio’s favour, whereas Rio state governor Sergio Cabral was sentenced to greater than 400 years in jail for his involvement within the scandals.

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