Naturally we in the Cidade Maravilhosa are delighted to have beaten out the Windy City and snatched the 2016 Olympics from under the nose of the not-quite-glamorous-enough first couple of the United States: even Obama can't compete with Copacabana when it comes to wowing Olympic committees.
But now that the cheering has died down along with the hangovers, a sober consideration of what the Olympics will mean for the world's most interesting and biodiverse urban environment is in order.
You don't normally associate biodiversity and conservation with cities, but Rio de Janeiro is an exception. Its extraordinary topography means steep hill slopes and mountainsides are still forested: not the least of the issues associated with the growth of favelas, Rio's hillside slums, is that their expansion corrodes this green mantle.
Rio's forests are a remnant of the Atlantic Forest that once covered most of coastal Brazil and stretched as far inland as Paraguay. Only 7 percent is left, making it much more threatened than the Amazon and even more biodiverse, since the surviving fragments act as refuge areas for species that once had much wider ranges. This makes what survives of the Atlantic Forest extraordinarily important. One of Latin America's oldest national parks, Tijuca National Forest, sits entirely within the city's boundaries, a natural treasure greater than any of its beaches. What does the Olympics mean to all this? In short, a mixed bag.
There will be big environmental benefits. The thing that first strikes visitors arriving at Rio's international airport, after the dilapidation of the airport itself, is the stench when you step outside the terminal. This toxic olfactory cocktail comes from the chemical plants and oil refineries that line Guanabara Bay, together with the sewage produced by the 5 million inhabitants of the Zona Norte, where tourists never go but half of Rio's population lives. Gagging on your way into town is an appropriate introduction to the contradictions produced by our glamorous international profile.
With the eyes - and, more to the point, the noses - of the world upon us, something will finally be done: serious sewage treatment and pollution control is coming. Maybe by 2016, for the first time in generations, it will even be possible to swim in the bay. One shudders to think what will happen to the yachting crews otherwise.
But beyond the bay, things are more ambiguous. The coming construction boom will provide alternative employment to the young men in the favelas who would otherwise move into our biggest growth industry after oil: narcotrafico. This boom will tamp down violence from criminals and the police (there's a big overlap between the two). The easy headlines about the risks posed by violence in Rio are misleading: nobody, from the drug lords down, has any interest in choking off the multidimensional bonanza the Olympics promises to be.
And therein lies a problem: after having been stable for 20 years, the city's population is likely to jump again as the boom attracts migrants from all over Brazil, which means expanding favelas and more human pressure on that precious Atlantic Forest.
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