Even Charles Dickens might have struggled to tell a tale of two cities more dissimilar than Rio de Janeiro and Leicester. The Brazilian metropole, home to Sugarloaf Mountain and Christ the Redeemer, contrasts starkly with an English municipality so nondescript that for years the most interesting thing about it was people’s regular mispronunciation of its name.
Leicester, (pronounced as Lester), is home to 330,000 residents; a population that pales in comparison to the six million Cariocas who live in Rio. Instead of the Copacabana and The Girl from Ipanema, Leicester, until lately, boasted little more than a couple of major crisp factories and a car park, under which lay the corpse of England's 15th-century king, Richard III.
In recent months, both cities have been in the news: front pages, back pages and plenty in between. While Rio, the former Brazilian capital, will become the first South American city to host an Olympic Games when the XXXI Olympiad officially starts on August 5, Leicester has been attracting attention courtesy of the entirely unfathomable heroics of its football team.
Yet, when it comes to public sentiment, the narratives could not be more different. For Leicester, these are the best of times; for Rio, the worst of times. It was a season of light for Leicester City; it has been a season of darkness for A Cidade Maravilhosa (The Marvellous City). A spring of hope ended with new champions of England; a Brazilian winter is arriving filled with despair.
Leicester City, who entered administration less than 15 years ago and were playing in the third tier of English football as recently as 2009, flipped the mighty Premier League on its head last month when they won the title a little more than a year after being rooted to the bottom of the table. It is an achievement impossible to exaggerate – the previous summer, one British bookmaker deemed Kim Kardashian more likely to become president of the United States than Leicester lifting the trophy.
In a world where money talks or talent walks, “the Foxes” were the ultimate underdogs. Despite now being owned by a Thai billionaire, the club’s 25-man squad were, at the start of the season, valued at £54m (Dh281m) – the same amount Abu Dhabi-owned Manchester City paid for a single Belgian midfielder (Kevin De Bruyne).
Similarly, Manchester United have spent more on transfers in the past two seasons than Leicester have in their entire 132-year history. Jamie Vardy, signed for a fee of £1 million in 2012, scored 24 goals last season, made the England squad for the European Championships taking place in France and is valued at £30m.
The unlikely triumph captured the imagination of the world. In the same week that Leicester's players were paraded aboard an open-topped bus on the streets of Bangkok, a pair of Brazilian men sat in a coffee shop in Rio's bohemian Botafogo neighbourhood wearing blue shirts with striker Vardy's name printed on the back. Articles extolling the virtues of coach Claudio Ranieri and his side appeared in The New York Times and South Africa's Mail & Guardian, among others.
In 2002, Leicester had been unable to pay a £16,000 bill to their local ambulance service and were a whisker away from insolvency. Fourteen years later, they have earned £93.22 million in prize money for winning the Premier League and, in qualifying for Europe’s lucrative UEFA Champions League, have secured an additional £30m, at least, and opened themselves up to myriad international sponsorship opportunities.
Yet while Leicester’s success story has produced a feel-good factor in world football, the Rio fairy-tale so far remains limited to the 2011 animated film to which the city loaned its name. The 2014 Fifa World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games were supposed to represent Brazil’s arrival on the world stage. Instead, the two mega-events have only served to heighten the strain – and the focus – on a country already struggling with its worst economic crisis in almost a century.
With less than seven weeks until the opening ceremony, Brazil is not only reeling from a political meltdown and several corruption scandals, but is also the epicentre of the Zika virus, about which several athletes, including Andy Murray and Rory McIlroy, have voiced concerns.
Rio city, meanwhile, is in the midst of a security crisis with local press reporting that drug gangs in 15 of the city’s notorious favelas are “at war”, and murder and robbery rates are up 15 and 30 per cent respectively. The news comes just months after the state slashed about 2 billion reais (Dh2bn) from the budget for police and special forces.
The severity of the security situation and the perceived immunity of perpetrators was highlighted last month when a 16-year-old girl was allegedly gang-raped in a favela by more than 30 men, some of whom posted boastful photos and videos of the crime on social media. The incident prompted nationwide protest marches calling for an end to violence against women and condemning the country’s “culture of rape”. Manifestations ahead of major sporting events are increasingly common. Similarly, each time a World Cup or Olympics approaches, it seems there are two conditions as certain as sunrise: 1) The event will be vastly over-budget and 2) It will be mired in controversy. In that sense, at least, Rio is perfectly on track.
In 2009, when the city won hosting rights for the Games, organisers estimated the total cost would be 28.8bn reais. Seven years later, come the event’s culmination on August 21, that figure is expected to be close to 40bn reais. Yet, despite the event being more than 35 per cent over-budget, some legacy promises, such as cleaning 80 per cent of the city’s heavily polluted Guanabara Bay – host to Olympic sailing – will not be fulfilled.
Other projects will be completed, although only after severe delays, leading to fears that a rush-job could put lives at risk. An elevated cycling track that opened earlier this year at a cost of 45m reais has already been forced to close indefinitely after a section of the coastal trail was hit by a wave and collapsed, leaving two people dead. Earlier this month, a new light-rail connecting the domestic airport with downtown Rio, which cost 1.2bn reais, broke down within hours of its inauguration following a power outage.
The key legacy project remains the construction of a new metro line connecting the affluent western region of Rio, where the Olympic Village is located, with the rest of the city. The idea is to ease congestion on the main artery between the two districts – a road that can regularly require setting aside 90 minutes to traverse 25 kilometres. The cost of the new line has reportedly doubled from about 5bn to 9.7bn reais, and after several delays is now scheduled to open just four days before the commencement of the Games.
In recent times, the arrival of the opening ceremony has brought with it temporary forgetfulness as excitement to see the world’s finest athletes on the world’s biggest stage takes over. Rio 2016, however, is at risk of being as much about who is not present as who is.
A November report by the World Anti-Doping Agency essentially accused Russia, which won 81 medals at the 2012 Games, of operating a state-backed doping programme, prompting the International Association of Athletics Federations to ban all Russian track and field athletes from taking part in international competitions. The governing body met yesterday in Vienna and decided to uphold the ban for the Olympic Games; some Russian athletes may still be allowed to participate as neutrals if they can prove they are “clean”, but the suspicions around doping in athletics will not be easy to resolve.
Russian tennis player Maria Sharapova will almost certainly not appear. A silver medallist in 2012, the five-time Grand Slam winner was banned for two years after failing a drug test, although she will reportedly appeal.
Regrettably, few of these issues are surprising. In sport, there is a growing, cynical sense of who next or what next? From cash-rich clubs winning cups and shiny stadiums displacing poverty-stricken residents to seemingly wholesome golfers being outed as serial adulterers and an entire national federation being found to have “a deeply rooted culture of cheating”, it takes a lot to shock a sports fan these days.
Which is precisely why Leicester’s triumph was greeted with such joy from neutrals: they bucked the trend and inverted the inevitable. And on August 13, one week into the Olympics, they will start their title defence. Much like Rio de Janeiro, however, now they will have to deal with the world’s spotlight and, to borrow another Dickens book title, great expectations.
Gary Meenaghan is a freelance sports writer currently reporting from Brazil.
This article was amended on June 19 to include the decision by the IAAF to ban Russia’s track and field team from the Rio Olympics.