The 2016 Summer Olympics will be held in Rio de Janeiro, the second largest city in Brazil, in South America, and are currently scheduled to operated from August 5 to 21, 2016. It is the most visited city in the Southern Hemisphere of the world, and is the first city in South America to host the Olympics. Mexico City hosted the Olympics in 1968 and is often considered part of South America, especially by European textbooks, but technically North America ends at the southern tip of Mexico. This may lead people to mistakenly believe that Rio is the second South American city to host the Olympics.
After this event, Africa will be the only inhabited continent to have never hosted an Olympic event.
The decision to grant Rio the Olympics was not one made lightly. Much of the reason that South America and Africa have never hosted Olympics before is because of the incredibly tight security required for the Olympics. Even though Rio has over 6 million people living in its borders, technologically it is much further behind similarly sized cities in the Northern Hemisphere. There was much popular support for the choice of Rio for these Olympics, but fear that it would be unable to safely handle the massive amounts of tourists that the Olympics bring.
The bidding for the 2012 Olympics begin in May 2007. Each city interested in hosting the Olympics was asked to fill out a questionnaire and return it by January 14, 2008. Of the cities that submitted, the 4 chosen to go onto voting were Chicago, Illinois; Madrid, Spain; Rio de Janeiro; and Tokyo, Japan. It later came out that the city of Doha, Qatar scored higher than Rio on the initial questionnaire, but it intended to host the Olympics in October, which was outside of the International Olympic Committee’s season.
The voting itself happened on October 2, 2009, in Copenhagen. Chicago and Rio were seen to be the top two choices on the list. United States President Barack Obama, his wife, and TV host Oprah Winfrey all traveled to Copenhagen personally to encourage the 115 member Evaluation Committee to vote for Chicago, which is home base for all three people. Despite their presence, however, Chicago was voted out in the first round. Tokyo was removed in the second round of voting, and in the final state, Rio beat Madrid by a 2-1 margin, 66-32.
Security is a concern for Rio. Drug cartels maintain significant influence in the city, and in one incident successfully shot down a police helicopter, killing 14 people. The city is working on plans to neutralize the danger for the Olympics however. The officials maintain that they are aware of the security problems, but so was the Evaluation Committee that ultimately voted to give them the Olympics.
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