office, the place seemed to be the perfect building site.
Today, the old racetrack is gone and half-finished towers and stadiums resembling recently landed spacecraft rise from the dirt. This will become the Olympic Park, ground zero in the world’s biggest sporting party next August.
Close by is the nearly completed Olympic Village, a forest of 31 matching tower blocks that will house many of the estimated 17,000 athletes and other participants. After the Olympics, the towers will turn into Rio’s newest upscale housing development.
Then in the middle, blocking a planned route into the Olympic Park, sits the Vila Autodromo favela.
And it has to go, says Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes.
The gradual disintegration of the tight-knit community has been a bitter affair, punctuated by occasional street demonstrations, fights with riot police and legal appeals.
But for some, the change has been nothing but good, proof that the Olympics isn’t just benefiting giant corporations like construction specialist Odebrecht, but ordinary folk.
“My quality of life has improved, so has my health,” said hairdresser Natalia Lacerda, 29, who is among the many accepting resettlement in a newly built apartment complex called Parque Carioca. Lacerda remembered the favela as a place of dirt, mosquitoes and difficult transport to the city centre.
In her new home, there is “everything. There’s a bus that goes everywhere, there’s basic sanitation. When it rains it doesn’t get muddy,” she said.
The holdouts facing off against the Olympic project see the equation differently.
“We lived humbly,” says Luis Claudio Silva, a 52-year-old physical education teacher, “but we were very happy before the Olympics came and this terror and psychological pressure was started.”
Residents report being offered as much as 400,000 reais ($119,600) by city authorities, sometimes double the value of their houses, but Silva says money isn’t the issue.