Gladwell's Line - First impressions of Rio

by Richard Gladwell on 9 Aug 2016 If it is Monday, this must be Rio.

Or is it Tuesday?

The days and datelines have become very blurred since leaving New Zealand on Sunday evening, for a quick flight across the Southern Ocean to Chile.

The Latam Airlines flight was comfortable enough, and popping into Santiago en route to Brazil was a little like Queenstown Revisited. Snow capped ranges to the left and right, but on the ground it was warmer than the Auckland I'd left behind.

Next stop Buenos Aires, a short four-hour hop across the Andres, but again very little sleep. Then it was onto Rio de Janeiro - a flight of four or five hours packed check to jowl in a B737 - remember those? The lack of sleep caught me out in the end with a crash-out in mid-flight, but putting enough gas in the tank to get through the next few hours.

Landed just before midnight to bring to the end a flight which seemed to have lasted two days but was probably about 20 plus hours.

The lot of self-funded media is quite different from the major news outlets - you're very much on your own. No drivers or pick-ups. Ours was a long bus ride in the early hours of the morning accompanied by the owner of the Airbnb accommodation rented not that far from the sailing venue.

Portuguese is very much the local language with varying degrees of English spoken. The work around is one of the marvels of the mobile phone age - a Google translator that will translate between languages - in either spoken or text on the phone - which becomes a scribble pad.

So communication is difficult at times - but there is a good workable solution.

(Except we have the same problem on the photo-boats with some non-English speaking drivers. Unfortunately the mobile phone app is not a good solution. Maybe the photographers will get over themselves and learn some Portuguese?)

After two hours sleep it was back on the road again, this time to the Main Media Centre on the other side of town - about 45 minutes away in a cab with little traffic.

Uber is the other great saver of a lone Kiwi trying to get around Rio. No phone calls trying to explain yourself in Portuguese or trying to work addresses out on a map. The simple phone app gets a cab to your door within a minute or two, and the fares are cheap, with nice clean cabs.

I think it was Robert Townsend in 'Up the Organisation' who claimed that any bureaucracy of greater than 1,000 people is self generating. It certainly seemed that way trying to get around the Main Media Centre site without a map (yep, the media kit and map was the last thing to be picked up)

And surprise, surprise my accreditation bounced once again - and had to be re-created for a third time on site.

'You're our special case', says an Australian member of the Media Accreditation team, explaining their side of my saga, which has been running for several months - beginning with my photo being replaced with that of top Swiss/US photographer Daniel Forster. We both had a good laugh about it and moved on. But it was cold comfort that my trip that had started out just to pick up a photographer's vest would have happened anyway.

Traipsing through the massive Main Media Centre, which seemed to be dominated by large empty rooms with few punters and plenty of staff doing what idle staff do best - not a lot. Spent forty minutes trying not to fall asleep on my feet, waiting for people to come back from breakfast.

Fortunately, there was the Olympic results system to test a muddled mind - revealing interesting statistical gems such as Russell Coutts has been the only Finn sailor from outside Europe to win a Gold Medal in the class in all 16 Olympics - Wow!
In the last four Olympics in the Finn class, the current world champion has won the Gold medal - and all those have been from Great Britain.

Business done (items which would normally be done in under 10 minutes at the Sailing Media Centre in other Olympics, but there is no hurry here).

Eventually, it was on a media bus - which was great. A system which works.

Then a bus trip through Rio - probably the only sightseeing I'll get a chance to do.

The city looks tired. A passing glimpse down narrow streets lined with favelas. Streets devoid of hope.

The slight of the favelas is quite a shock. Most look like they are in the process of demolition, but with definite signs of habitation. Small wonder there are riots in some areas. The priorities seem to be wrong, but the sheer scale of the favelas mean that the Olympic expenditure would be a drop in the bucket.

On to the much-maligned Olympic sailing venue. This was the surprise of the day.

On the water for fours hours or so, in the main channel, there was no rubbish, body parts. One small piece of plastic was the total debris score for the day.

The water colour isn't great - but to be fair, other water in the world is that colour, too. The bow waves were white with no give-away yucky foam.

Exiting the marina, and heading back in at the end of the day was again a surprise - no obvious signs of pollution - well, not in the main waterway at least.

Out on the race course, Rio will be an interesting challenge. Obviously, one day with the wind coming from a single direction isn't enough to make a judgment.

The results speak for themselves - with top sailors battling away at the tail of the fleet in one race, and then contesting the lead in another- in the monohulls at least. Expect the unexpected is probably the name of the game for the Rio Olympics.

The top sailors will probably win through, as they usually do. But from what has been seen to date this is not a drag race regatta venue.

A clear take-out from the day was the performance of sailors from the so-called developing nations, who in several instances had the ability to mix it with the more fancied name sailors in the class. Some even hung in for good countable finishes, but most contributed to the competitive traffic in the already tight racing. The outcome was that if the Scheidts and Burtons of the world got back in the pack, their task to climb back to the head of the fleet was made more difficult by the sailors from the 'developing' countries who look to be reaping the benefits of good coaching programmes in the four years since Weymouth.

Add to that the fact that one side of the course seemed to favoured each leg. Of course if the so-called minnows happened to jump on the right escalator, the heavy metal in the fleet had a difficult task ahead to thread their way through to achieve a counting place.

Outside the entrance to Guanabara Bay, it certainly looks like a rough open water venue, that sits interestingly alongside the flat waters of the harbour, ringed by sugar-loaf geography - which has a major influence on the breeze, whatever the direction.

In many ways, Rio is not unlike San Francisco - a large area of water in an inner harbour that exits through quite a narrow channel to the sea. But of course without the one-dimensional breeze.

From what we saw today, all bets are off with this regatta. Should be an interesting couple of weeks.

PS. To cap off a rather eventful three days, our photo boat broke down a couple of hours into the day, but the off-course substitute was a big improvement. Sadly we never made it to the Windsurfer course.