Sports Management takes a closer look at the facilities which will host this summer’s Olympic Games

The Rio 2016 Olympic Games will see the return of a traditional “city Games”, with nearly all sporting events – the only exception being football – taking place within the boundaries of Rio de Janeiro. In total, athletes will compete for medals at 32 venues across the city, while football will be co-hosted by five other locations: Belo Horizonte, Brasília, Manaus, Salvador and São Paulo.

The venues in Rio will be divided into four zones. Most of the Games facilities are spread across two clusters – the main Olympic Park in Barra and the Deodoro Olympic district, located 5m (8km) north of Barra – with the Maracana Stadium and the famous Copacabana beach also hosting events.

BARRA OLYMPIC PARK
The Barra cluster houses the main Olympic park and its nine sporting venues, as well as the Riocentro Conference Centre and the brand new Reserva de Marapendi golf course. The park has been built on the site of the former Autódromo Internacional Nelson Piquet – a Formula One motorsport circuit demolished to make way for hosting the Olympics (for more, see pp. 34-37).

Barra will be the beating heart of the Games, with nine venues hosting 16 Olympic and nine Paralympic sports. The Olympic Park will also house athletes’ accommodation, the main press centre and the International Broadcast Centre. There are also large fan zones, designed to create a carnival atmosphere from early morning and long into the warm Rio nights.

DEODORO
Located 5 m (8km) north of the Olympic Park, the Deodoro cluster will host 11 Olympic and four Paralympic sports. Three of the nine venues in the complex were existing ones, a legacy of the 2007 Pan-American Games and the 2011 World Military Games.

In total, four new permanent venues have been built – the Deodoro Arena, Olympic Hockey Centre and the X Park, which includes the Olympic BMX Centre and the Olympic Whitewater Stadium. Two further, temporary structures complete Deodoro – the Modern Pentathlon Arena and the Olympic Mountain Bike Park facility.

One of the most complex facilities, the X Park’s Whitewater Stadium, contains 25 million litres of water in its two canoe slalom courses: one for the competitions, measuring 250 metres, and a 200-metre training and warm up course.

LEGACY
The Rio de Janeiro city government placed legacy at the heart of its Games planning from the very beginning. The government has looked to emulate two previous host cities – Barcelona (1992) and London (2012) – which used the Games to successfully regenerate large parts of the cities.

Rio’s legacy plans are centred around the two main venue clusters and have been designed to provide future facilities for education, public leisure, elite-level sports and social projects. “Since the start, when Rio de Janeiro won the right to host the Games, our plan was to invest in the legacy that would be left to the city,” says Pedro Paulo Teixeira, secretary for staff at Rio’s municipal city council.

“If you look around the two clusters, the construction projects are simple and efficient, nothing too far-fetched. Our focus is on the Games, of course, but we are also thinking about the future.”

NOMADIC ARCHITECTURE
The most innovative aspect of Rio’s legacy plans is the way some of the major venues will be reused post-Games. While temporary structures, which can be moved and built elsewhere in the same configuration, are now commonplace, Rio will take the concept of flexible architecture even further.

Of the nine competition venues in Barra Olympic Park, two will be dismantled and rebuilt as entirely new projects, thanks to the concept of ‘nomadic architecture’. The BRR121m (£27m, US$37m) Future Arena, which will host the handball competition during the Olympic Games and goalball during the Paralympics, will be taken apart and its materials used to construct four new public schools across Rio de Janeiro, each with a capacity of 500 students.

“Converting the Rio 2016 handball arena into four schools after the Games is an excellent example of Rio’s commitment to ensuring the 2016 Games leave tangible benefits for the local community,” says Rio 2016 Organising Committee president Carlos Nuzman. “The nomadic architecture concept, defined by our government partners, is a first for the Games and we are proud that 2,000 Brazilian schoolchildren will benefit from it for many years to come.”

The Olympic Aquatics Stadium, meanwhile, will be taken apart and the materials used to construct two new aquatics centres, both of which will have 50m Olympic swimming pools. One will boast a grandstand of 6,000 seats, while the other will have seating for 3,000 spectators.

The other seven venues will stay in place at the Olympic Park, but will be reconfigurated in order to create a permanent centre for sports excellence. Carioca Arena 3 – which will host fencing, taekwondo and Paralympic judo – will become an Olympic Experimental School (GEO in Portuguese) with space for 850 full-time students after the Games.

The remaining six venues will form the newly established Olympic Training Centre, providing top-level facilities for a host of sports, including tennis, wrestling, weightlifting, badminton, fencing, taekwondo, judo and athletics – as well as being available for the GEO students and social projects.

An Olympic-standard athletics track and two beach volleyball courts will be added to the park, as well as a dormitory for high-performance and amateur athletes, which will have 166 twin bedrooms and be built – again using nomadic architecture – from materials used in the construction of the International Broadcast Centre, which will be a fixture of the park during the Games.