The Summer Olympic Games 2016, widely known as Rio 2016 will be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Let’s see some interesting facts and trivia about them!
1.The bidding process for the 2016 Summer Olympic Games was officially launched on 16 May 2007.
2. The first step for each city was to submit an initial application to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) by 13 September 2007, confirming their intention to bid. Completed official bid files, containing answers to a 25-question IOC form, were to be submitted by each applicant city by 14 January 2008.
3. Four candidate cities were chosen for the shortlist on 4 June 2008: Chicago, Madrid, Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo (which hosted the 1964 Summer Olympics and will host again in 2020.
4. The final voting was held on 2 October 2009, in Copenhagen with Madrid and Rio de Janeiro perceived as favourites to land the games. Chicago and Tokyo were eliminated after the first and second rounds of voting, respectively, while Rio de Janeiro took a significant lead over Madrid heading into the final round.
5. The lead held and Rio de Janeiro was announced as host of 2016 Summer Olympics. Failed bids from other South American cities include Buenos Aires (1936, 1956, 1968, 2004) and Brasília, which withdrew during the 2000 Summer Olympic bidding process.
6. On 26 June 2011 it was reported on AroundTheRings.com that Roderlei Generali, the COO of the Rio de Janeiro Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games, resigned just one year after taking the job at ROOC.
7. Events will take place at eighteen existing venues (eight of which require some redevelopment), nine new venues constructed for the Summer Games, and seven temporary venues which will be removed following the games.
8. Each event will be held in one of four geographically segregated Olympic clusters: Barra, Copacabana, Deodoro, and Maracanã. The same was done for the 2007 Pan American Games.
9. Several of the venues will be located at the Barra Cluster Olympic Park.
10. The largest venue at the games in terms of seating capacity is the Maracanã Stadium, officially known as Jornalista Mário Filho Stadium, which can hold 74,738 spectators and will serve as the official Olympic Stadium, hosting the opening and closing ceremonies as well as football finals.
11. The athletes’ village is claimed to become the largest in Olympic history. Fittings will include about 80,000 chairs, 70,000 tables, 29,000 mattresses, 60,000 clothes hangers, 6,000 television sets and 10,000 smartphones.
12. The Barra Olympic Park is a cluster of nine sporting venues in Barra da Tijuca, in the west zone of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil that will be used for the 2016 Summer Olympics and the 2016 Summer Paralympics.
13. Additionally some football games will take place at 5 venues in the cities of São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Salvador, Brasília and Manaus.
14. The Games require more than 200 kilometres of security fencing. To store material, Rio 2016 is using two warehouses. A 15,000 square metre warehouse in Barra da Tijuca in western Rio is being used to assemble and supply the furniture and fittings for the Olympic Village.
15. A second warehouse of 90,000 square metres, located in Duque de Caxias near the roads that provide access to the venues, contains all the equipment needed for the sporting events.
16. The Rio Olympic Games will have brand-new robotic technology created by Mark Roberts Motion Control to broaden the reach of photographers at multiple venues.
17. It was announced August 1st 2016 that Microsoft Azure has been selected by NBC Olympics to provide cloud encoding and hosting with video workflows for NBC Olympics’ production of the Games.
18. The Olympic flame was lit at the temple of Hera in Olympia on 21 April 2016, the traditional start of the Greek phase of the torch relay. On 27 April the flame was handed over to the Brazilian organizers at a ceremony at the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens.
19. The two new sports for 2016 Olympic Games are golf and rugby sevens. There were two open spots for sports and initially seven sports began the bidding for inclusion in the 2016 program.
2o. Baseball and softball, which were dropped from the program in 2005, karate, squash, golf, roller sports, and rugby union all applied to be included.
21. The International Sailing Federation announced in May 2012 that windsurfing would be replaced at the 2016 Olympics by kitesurfing,[32] but this decision was reversed in November.
22. Kuwait was banned in October 2015 for the second time in five years over government interference in the country’s Olympic committee.
23. Due to the European migrant crisis and other reasons, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) will allow athletes to compete as Independent Olympians under the Olympic Flag. In the previous Olympic Games, refugees were ineligible to compete because of their inability to represent their home NOC’s.
24. In November 2015, Russia was provisionally suspended from all international athletic competitions by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) following a World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) report into a doping program in the country.
25. The logo represents three figures, in the yellow, green, and blue of the Brazilian flag, joined at the arms and in a triple embrace, with the overall shape reflecting that of Sugarloaf Mountain.
26. The logo was based on four concepts: contagious energy, harmonious diversity, exuberant nature, and Olympic spirit. The Rio firm Tatíl designed the winning entry for the logo in a competition involving 139 agencies.
27. The logo has been noted as evoking Henri Matisse’s painting Dance. There were also allegations by the Colorado-based Telluride Foundation that the logo had been plagiarized from its own.
28. The Olympic mascot Vinicius, named after musician Vinicius de Moraes, carries design traits of mammals and represents Brazilian wildlife.
29. An ongoing outbreak of the mosquito-borne Zika virus in Brazil has raised fears regarding its potential impact on athletes and visitors. Organizers plan to perform daily inspections of Olympic venues to prevent puddles of stagnant water that allow mosquitoes to breed.
30. The Guanabara Bay, whose waters will be used for sailing and windsurfing competitions, is heavily polluted. Among the chief causes of the pollution are uncollected trash fed into the bay via polluted rivers and slums along the coast. Pollution of the Guanabara has been a long-term issue. Officials promised at the Earth Summit in 1992 that they would begin to address the pollution but previous attempts to do so have been insufficient.
Read here some interesting facts about Brazil!
Read here some fun facts about Rio de Janeiro!
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