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On April 20 I suggested the IOC will rue the day it awarded the 2016 Olympic Games to Rio de Janeiro.
That day has arrived with the 81-seat Brazilian Senate voting 55-22 overnight to impeach the country’s first female President Dilma Rousseff for breaking budget laws.
To underline how bizarre the vote was, 49 of the 81-seat Senate are under investigation for corruption.
The vote means former President Rousseff steps down for 180 days awaiting trial, with the Olympic opening ceremony just 84 days away.
With Brazil in political chaos, in financial chaos with an inflation rate of 11 per cent, and suffering a rapidly increasing crime and corruption rate that makes Rio a dangerous city, Rio is not fit to host the Games.
Throw in the Zika virus, and Rio is a no no.
If the World Health Organisation and the United Nations had any bottle and were not toothless wonders, both would step in to ban Rio hosting on the Zika virus alone.
With 10,000 Olympians and over 500,000 spectators from all over the world, the risk of spreading the Zika virus is obvious, even to a layman.
It’s taken Dr Amir Attaran of Harvard Public Health to paint the true picture.
“Mass migration into the heart of an outbreak is a public health no-brainer. Given the choice between accelerating a dangerous new disease or not — for it is impossible that Games will slow Zika down — the answer should be a no-brainer for the Olympic organisers too. Putting sentimentality aside, clearly the Rio 2016 Games must not proceed.”
The IOC cannot afford to play Russian roulette with the dangerous virus. Instead, IOC boss Thomas Bach should ring British Prime Minister David Cameron to suggest London takeover the Games.
The infrastructure is still there from the 2012 Olympics, and you can bet the PM would jump at the chance of hosting two Games in succession – the financial returns huge.
But better still the Olympic Games would be held in a safe haven.
Tough for Rio, but they didn’t deserve it in the first place, and certainly haven’t deserved it since the Zika virus surfaced, and the impeachment of their President.