# data[].attributes.body
Quote: http://www.isi.edu/integration/people/lerman/papers/Smith13socialcom.pdf

# data[].attributes.body
Picture 1: http://i.imgur.com/sKeskUs.jpg
Picture 2: https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/nintchdbpict000257019605.jpg?w=960

# data[].attributes.body
(Looking at this as Broadcast television, not Youtube)

# data[].attributes.body
Via Twitter

# data[].attributes.body
via the New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Sports of The Times

RIO DE JANEIRO - Proud and beautiful as this seaside city is, glorious as the feats of athleticism and sportsmanship were these past two weeks, these Games underline that the Olympic model is fractured.

As we depart, Rio de Janeiro is left with stadiums for which it has little use and swimming pools far removed from the working class who could dearly use them. Tens of thousands of residents were displaced, a golf course sits atop a former nature preserve, and the towers of the athletes' village will have a second life as luxury housing. Rio's state government turns its pockets inside out looking for money to pay salaries and to keep hospitals open. The army withdraws, and fears rise that crime will spiral.

The International Olympic Committee has taken steps toward reform. But what it demands of nations is basically unchanged: Build us expensive monuments with a shelf life of two weeks. The I.O.C. has no hammer to bring down when cities fail to deliver on environmental promises.

There is a more sustainable and less ruinous path, and I will get to that. First, I should wrestle with the challenge tossed down by my colleague Roger Cohen. He is an incisive, humane observer, and he argued that critics have the Rio Olympics all wrong.

His perspective should be reckoned with, even as I disagreed with nearly every word.

"I am tired, very tired," Cohen wrote last week, "of reading negative stories about these Brazilian Olympics - the anger in the slums, the violence that continues (including the armed robbery of four American swimmers), the enduring gulf between rich and poor, the occasional organizational hassles, the Russian doping and the Brazilian mosquito, money that could supposedly have been spent better."

Image

Residents of Rio questioned how long the heavy security presence during the Games will be maintained. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times

He argued that the developed world harbors an antipathy for grand sporting events held in the developing world.

I would turn his formulation on its head. The greatest honor we can pay to a nation is to take its maladies seriously. Brazil overthrew a dictatorship and remains a gloriously messy democracy. Yet police and paramilitary violence and human rights violations accompany its grand sporting events. Brazilian officials, desperate to tamp down the vicious drug gangs before the Olympics, let the army and the police ratchet up violence, to the point that last year the police committed one-fifth of the homicides in Rio.

Such problems are not unique to Rio de Janeiro. "A major sporting event," Amnesty International wrote of Rio, "tends to increase the human rights violations that already occur in a host city."

Runners passing by the clock tower during the men's marathon on the final day of the 2012 London Olympics, where the effect of the Games on the city was viewed as more benign. Credit Jed Jacobsohn for The New York Times

London remains one of the globe's more grossly unequal cities, and terrific activism was afoot during those Olympics. I recall walking through London's East End before those Games and talking with the imams, bakers, construction workers, students and pastors who were the backbone of East London Communities Organization. They successfully pressured the London organizers to pay living wages to all who worked inside the Olympic perimeter.

"They said they had obligations to their contractors," Lina Jamoul, an organizer told me at the time. "We said: 'What you have is a bureaucracy. That isn't our problem.'"

Activists in London also applied concerted pressure to get the Olympic corporation to create 2,000 units of affordable housing after the Games.

The Olympic Village in Rio, where these athletes arrived on Aug. 2, will be turned into luxury apartment towers, although suitable housing for a large share of the city's population is lacking. Credit Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images

Large areas of unoccupied seats could often be seen at Summer Games venues in Rio, including Olympic Stadium. This audience for a first-round men's soccer match between Honduras and Algeria was far from a capacity crowd. Credit Matthias Hangst/Getty Images

In the end, the Olympics must change. Travel to Athens or Sochi and you will find a shattered vase of a model. Fewer and fewer cities desire that. In the past few years, residents of would-be host cities revolted, and Oslo and Boston, among other cities, canceled bids to host the Games.

I'm no dour Puritan; I love great athletics. My heart leapt as I watched Usain Bolt fly down the track and Simone Biles spin and flip as if exempt from the laws of gravity. To stand in the legendary Maracanã stadium for the gold medal men's soccer game and listen as Brazilians transformed it into a joyous asylum was a wonder.

Cariocas were gracious, from Copacabana baristas to an impoverished 64-year-old, Marie Auxiliadora, who invited me into her home in Favela do Mandela to listen to her upset with these too-expensive Games.

One day, perhaps even next time, we can deliver a sustainable Olympics worthy of them.

Email: powellm@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B9 of the New York edition with the headline: Olympic Model Is Riddled With Flaws. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Rio Games Highlight Problems With the Olympic Model

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Sports of The Times RIO DE JANEIRO - Proud and beautiful as this seaside city is, glorious as the feats of athleticism and sportsmanship were these past two weeks, these Games underline that the Olympic model is fractured.

# data[].attributes.body
Via YouTube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
NBC's opening montage for 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio