Brazil’s Riocentro gives minor sports a major stage
The idea was as simple as it was shrewd when it debuted at the Atlanta Games 20 years ago.
Take a handful of less-popular Olympic events, group them together in adjoining venues, and create a kind of sports buffet, allowing fans to sample a number of competitions while creating the kind of buzz none of those sports could create on their own.
This summer that buffet has been laid out at the sprawling Riocentro conference center, the largest venue of its kind in South America and the site of Olympic badminton, boxing, table tennis and weightlifting.
On Sunday, thousands descended on the 140-acre exhibition center and its six low-slung pavilions, which are laid out around a central, tree-lined courtyard, leaving Riocentro looking a bit like a small-college campus.
Four years ago in London, many of the smaller Olympics events took place in temporary, soul-less venues. But the massive, warehouse-sized buildings at Riocentro, some of which stretch to nearly a quarter-million square feet, give their sports a far more permanent feel.
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The largest crowd to gather Sunday packed Pavilion 3 for second- and third-round matches in table tennis.
“I like this sport,” Uillian Ferrara dos Santos, wearing a yellow Brazilian soccer jersey, said as he looked down at the furious competition unfolding on the four tables. “Since we are children we liked to practice this.”
Dos Santos, who lives across Guanabara Bay in the upper-middle class suburb of Niteroi, paid nearly $90 to bring his wife and two sons to Riocentro with him. The family also has tickets to tennis and beach volleyball.
“We wanted to be a part of this,” he said of the Rio Games. “This is history.”
This isn’t the first time history came to Riocentro. In 1981, four years after the expo center was built, two bombs were detonated at a May Day music concert, an attack the military tried to pin on left-wing radicals. Evidence later implicated the army in the bombing, which killed one of the plotters and injured the other, helping hasten the end of the dictatorship.
Riocentro also played host to a United Nations Earth Summit in 1992 and the 2007 Pan American Games, which proved to be something of a test run for this summer’s Olympics.
About 200 yards from where Dos Santos stood above the table tennis competition, Jaquelin Reis and 13 other family members filed into Pavilion 2 for the afternoon weightlifting competition, filling nearly two rows in the half-empty bleachers. The family is dressed alike in white T-shirts adorned with a photo of Brazilian weightlifter Rosane dos Reis Santos, the relative they’ve come to cheer.
And Dos Reis Santos responds to the support, setting three national records and lifting nearly twice her body weight. That, however, wasn’t enough as Dos Reis Santos finished fifth.
Her family smiles and hugs her just the same while outside, in an open space between two pavilions, the next generation of Brazilian weightlifters hoists cardboard and Styrofoam barbells over their heads.
In the interactive “sports experience” area just inside the park’s main entrance fans can also try their hand at table tennis and badminton or step into the open-air boxing gym, where visitors lined up to pound away at speed bags or to have their picture taken with an oversized cardboard cutout of U.S. champion Claressa Shields.
Huge concrete and steel structures make up the the Riocentro complex where a number of Olympic events are being held.
That didn’t interest Danish sailor Lasse Hedevang nearly as much as the discus-sized pizzas at the concession stand. The three-masted ship on which Hedevang and his sailing academy classmates traveled to Brazil will remain anchored in the bay for another couple of weeks, so those lucky enough to get shore leave headed straight to Riocentro to check out the Olympics.
“We just want to see an event. We don’t care what sport,” Hedevang said, clutching a ticket for the night boxing session.
“We just want to feel the vibe,” said Peder Smith, a Norwegian crewmate.
While Hedevang and Smith finished dinner, a line more than 100 people deep formed outside the newly built boxing venue for a program of 10 preliminaries. Once inside, they’re greeted by the grim tableaux of five volunteers practicing the procedure for removing an injured fighter from the ring on a stretcher.
Fortunately those skills aren’t needed in the first fight, a lightweight bout between France’s Sofiane Oumiha and South Florida’s Teofimo Lopez, who is representing Honduras after failing to make the U.S. team.
Photos and memories are made in a whimsical area of the Riocentro complex where a number of Olympic sports are played in a large convention center complex.
As the dancing Oumiha showboated his way through three rounds Lopez, a classic straight-ahead fighter, chased him around the ring. When the judges awarded the Frenchman a unanimous decision, the crowd booed. Lopez, meanwhile, dropped to his knees in the center of the ring and pounded at the blue canvas.
Then just as quickly he climbed to his feet, executed a perfect somersault and climbed out of the ring to the cheers of the crowd. The fans, Lopez knew, had come to Riocentro more for a show than a sport. And he made sure they got what they paid for.
kevin.baxter@latimes.com
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