As long as the professional referees don't stab any of the players fatally, it should all be good. Except for the dozens, potentially hundreds of tourists who are gonna be robbed or if they're very unlucky kidnapped and ransomed. Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia all rank quite high in number of kidnappings. Rio was the world capital of kidnappings and ransom of tourists a few years back.
edit: This question/answer on yahoo answers gets quite a lot of it right:
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil's kidnapping capital. 2016 Olympis?
Im just dumbfounded on why the Olympic committee has picked Brazil for the 2016 Olympic's. With it's high rate of murders,Kidnappings,drug wars, corrupt police etc... would you go to the Olympic games ?"
Best Answer - Chosen by Voters
I'm from the United States and I've been living in Rio for the better part of the past 7 years. And I DO think it's a valid question, the issue of security -- but not exactly in the way you asked. I'm thinking about all the cops and military they will need to maintain safety. That could potentially become a public relations nightmare for the city and give it an even worse reputation.
Yeah, Rio has hosted big international events in the past: the 1992 environmental conference, various meetings of the Rio Group (an alternative to the Organization of American States), the 2007 Pan-American Games. But this will be bigger than anything they've attempted until now.
In the past, the solution for security for these events was always the same: call in the army, and put tons of soldiers in the streets. Also, occupy the favelas (slums) anywhere close to the meeting or event or whatever. But I'm not sure how that would work in the case of the Olympics. On any given day here, you can run into tons of cops from special tactical units walking around with semi-automatic rifles, or even just regular cops driving around with their machine guns sticking out the windows of their cars. Much more of that would be necessary to maintain security during the 2016 Olympics. But during the Olympic games, that kind of thing could backfire on them, freak out the tourists, and look really bad in the eyes of the world.
Rio is NOT just a big city like any other. Both Rio and Sao Paulo exist in a permanent state of low-intensity civil war. (The kidnapping capital isn't Rio, though; that's Greater Sao Paulo City and State. Seems like most Americans think it's Rio because of something they saw one time on TV, apparently.)
Big parts of Rio are under the de facto control of rival drug gangs or competing militias, and the cops are constantly fighting with these different groups. So the police invade the favelas all the time and kill more of the people there. To give just one example I remember: in one day, in one police operation, they killed 19 people, MOST of them drug mafia "soldiers" according to the police, but also a few civilians caught in the crossfire. That's normal here. In Atlanta or Chicago or most other cities, can you imagine the political shitstorm and investigations if the cops killed 19 people in one day? But here, that sort of thing is forgotten by next week, because there's always some other sensational crime story to take its place. A young girl killed in the crossfire following a midday bank robbery -- on her birthday. A boy dragged to death after some other robbers carjacked his family's vehicle to use as a getaway car. And the list goes on and on and on.
Cariocas (the residents of Rio) do complain about all the murders and crime and carjackings a lot, but most of them don't seem to have any solutions. Most people don't trust the police, considering them little better than the criminals. Most people think the cops are just as murderous as the bad guys. They sure manage to kill a hell of a lot of people. Oh, and the reason Rio doesn't have TV shows dedicated to solving crimes? Most murders just go unsolved.
I think most people here hope that hosting the Olympics will make things better. By putting the world's media spotlight on Rio and Brazil, they hope that this will force politicians to take action to try to limit the amount of crime and violence in the city, if only to control the bad publicity. But a lot could happen between now and 2016.
Just look at Sao Paulo in 2006. In one weekend in May of that year, the city was effectively taken over by criminals, and over 100 police were murdered in the streets. During the week that followed, the police (of course) took their revenge and killed possibly 300-400 people in the poorer neighborhoods of city. You can read about it in the links."
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091005161848AAGDtPm
