Less than a month after Rio de Janeiro was chosen to host the 2016 Olympics, International Olympic Committee (IOC) representatives were meeting with Brazilian authorities to draw up a plan of action to prepare the Games. The meeting was taking place Friday and Saturday at the traditional Copacabana Palace hotel in Rio.
Before getting started, those in attendance watched a video message from IOC president Jacques Rogge, who congratulated Brazilians for having been chosen as Olympic hosts and reminded them of future challenges.
“That conquest comes with a great responsibility. The IOC has shown great confidence in Rio de Janeiro and in its vision for the Games. We will be in Rio many times and we will work very closely with the organizing committee, because history shows that only joint effort generates great achievements,” he said.
Gilbert Felli, the IOC’s director of the Olympic Games, said the gathering will seek to define work for the coming seven years and to build closer ties with the organizing committee. The common goal is to hold exceptional Games in 2016, he said.
Brazil was represented in the meetings by Sports Minister Orlando Silva, Rio de Janeiro Governor Sergio Cabral and Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes, as well as the head of the Rio 2016 host committee Carlos Arthur Nuzman.
Nuzman said that the IOC made “a historic decision” by granting Rio the first Olympics ever held in South America.
In a note issued this Friday, October 30, by the Itamaraty, Brazil’s Foreign Relations Ministry, the Brazilian government expressed its belief that the agreement worked out in Honduras by deposed president Manuel Zelaya and the man who took over in his place, Roberto Micheletti, will put an end to a crisis that’s been dragging for four months.
Zelaya has been the host of the Brazilian embassy in capital Tegucigalpa since his surprising and clandestine return to the country after having been expelled from it. Since September 21st, Zelaya and a group of followers took shelter in the Brazilian diplomatic representation. The deposed leader was ousted on June 28 by a coup d’état led by Micheletti.
The communiqué says that the Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s administration received the news of the agreement with satisfaction and hope for a “peaceful outcome.”
“Brazil trusts that the agreement reached yesterday will allow the full reintegration of Honduras into the inter American and international systems and the prompt normalization of the situation of its Embassy in Tegucigalpa,” says the note. (more…)
