We have already been home from Rio for a day. My apologies for the delay in completing this blog. If you can bear with me, I hope to finish it in the next week or two.
Today, we have archery. Unlike the previous days, this event is at an arena located near the city center rather than near the Barra Olympic park. This means that we have to take the Metro 1 or 2 lines and instead of trains that are filled with only Olympic spectators and team or staff members, we'll be on trains loaded with people going to work. The event starts at 9 am so we leave early to make sure we get there on time.
Today, we have archery. Unlike the previous days, this event is at an arena located near the city center rather than near the Barra Olympic park. This means that we have to take the Metro 1 or 2 lines and instead of trains that are filled with only Olympic spectators and team or staff members, we'll be on trains loaded with people going to work. The event starts at 9 am so we leave early to make sure we get there on time.
At each Metro station, there is a big green board that tells spectators how to get to the various venues. The instructions for this event are to get on Linha (Line) 1 and get off at Central if your tickets say Entry A or at Praça Onze if your tickets say Entry B. Wow, a stadium large enough to have two Metro stops?
The Praça Onze station is in a quiet residential neighborhood. The signage is not great, but there are a lot of Olympic volunteers around to point us in the correct direction. This turns out to be important as we are directed toward a huge, and fairly old concrete structure. When we come out on the other side, this is what we see:
On either side are huge grandstands each topped with a light tower. But the center space is too narrow for futbol (soccer) - and it is paved. What is this place? Beth suggested a drag race strip, but we don't see any scoreboards or a area blacked with burned rubber from tires. As we reach the end, we see one of the infamous favelas - the urban slums of Rio. Here is a closer view:
Approximately 20% of Rio's 6+ million people live in favelas like this one. Many are crime ridden, but like in poor areas around the world, the people that suffer the most from the crime are the ones that live there. Most of the favelas are located high up hillsides so they have great views of the surroundings. Rio's geology consists of a whole bunch of granite intrusions formed in a similar way to Yosemite Valley in California. These intrusions are very steep so maybe the favelas ended up in areas that could not be easily developed?
Anyway, the sight of the favela and the name of the stadium Sombodromo finally gave me the answer to the use of this stadium. Here is a view in it's more typical usage:
This is the stadium where the samba contest takes place during the Rio Carnival in February. The contest is a battle for supremacy of samba skills between the many samba schools, which often represent specific favelas. It holds about 90,000 spectators, but there are many, many people there who do not have seats.
The Olympic archery competition takes place at the far end of the stadium near the arch in the previous picture. When we walk into the stadium, there is practically no one in the stands:
This is starting to be a trend for this Olympics. The Brazilians will show up to an event that they are unfamiliar with, but only if there is a Brazilian athlete taking part. This is too bad because we have enjoyed archery each time we've seen it. Confirming my guess about the use of this stadium, the event starts with a small samba performance:
While Brazilians come in all colors, you will notice that most of the samba performers are darker skinned. This is also true of the populations of the favelas - they tend to be darker skinned than the average. However, it is not clear, at least to us, that this income inequality is racially based. We see people of all colors who appear to be financially secure.
Just before the archery matches begin, we see our first mosquitoes of our trip. Three mosquitoes in 5 days - this gives you an idea of how overblown the whole Zika thing was. The stands are filled with Brazilians in tank tops and shorts so there is a significant amount of exposed skin available for these few mosquitoes. Sean is willing to bet that there are no Zika carrying mosquitoes with a taste for North American blood. But we did pay a lot of attention to these few bugs until the wind picked up and blew them away.
Today's contest are individual matches in the rounds of 32 and 16. At the beginning of the individual archery competition, each competitor shoots 12 groups of 6 arrows. The distance from archer to target is 70 meters and the target is a bulls-eye with 10 concentric rings for scores of 10 to 1. After each set of 3 arrows for each competitor, the judges come out to look at the targets:
If the arrow is on a line, it counts as being in the higher scoring circle so this competitor scored 10-9-8 for 27 points. With a high score of 10 points per arrow, the highest possible score in the qualification round is 720 points. After that, the top 64 archers in the qualification round are placed into a bracket so that the number 1 ranked archer will shoot against the number 64 ranked archer, 2 against 63 and so on in the round of 64. In Rio, Woojin Kim of Korea set an Olympic and World record in the qualification round with a score of 700 while Gavin Sutherland of Zimbabwe was seeded 64th with a score of 566. In the women's qualification round, Misun Choi of Korea was seeded first with a score of 669 while Yessica Camilo Gonzalez of the Dominican Republic was seeded 64th.
This is not your standard bows and arrows. Take a look at this recursive bow:
Each of the little nobs and bars are designed to perfectly balance the bow. They can also be adjusted to account for the wind. Each athlete's coach stands behind the archer with a spotting scope to help the archer adjust the bow for the wind conditions.
Each set consists of 3 arrows for each archer so the maximum score is 30. If an archer wins, he/she gets 2 points. If they tie, each archer gets 1 point. The winner is the first archer to get 6 points. One of the first matches is between 12th seeded Seungyun Lee of Korea and 53rd seed Daniel Rezende Xavier of Brazil:
There aren't many people here, but there is a very vocal group wearing Korean shirts:
There aren't many people here, but there is a very vocal group wearing Korean shirts:
Note that most of these fans look decidedly un-Korean. This appears to be a rent-a-crowd. I had seen a big group of people in these shirts outside the stadium, but couldn't figure out what was going on. It appears that a Korean person was rounding up people and giving them a shirt and bangers if they would cheer for Korea. It is not clear whether they also got tickets to the event in the deal, but I would not be surprised. The funny thing is that the Koreans need no support, the have won about two-thirds of the medals in archery since it was introduced in the 1980's. As expected, Lee also needs no help, beating Rezende Xavier in 4 sets: 28-22, 30-27, 27-28 and 28-26 for a score of 6 points to 2.
At the other end of the spectrum of rooting for an athlete, we see this couple:
who are clearly the parents of Japanese archer (and 10th seed) Kaori Kawanaka of Japan. TV tends to focus on the contenders to win medals, but about 95% of the athletes here have no expectations of winning a medal. The Olympics is the prize that they have won for being one of the top couple of athletes in their sport in each country. In this sense, everyone competing in Rio is a winner regardless of their medal chances. Kawanaka's parents are understandably proud just to see their daughter compete in the top tournament in the world after what is probably years of practice to get to this level. Kawanaka:
is matched in the round of 32 against Evangelia Psarra of Greece. She manages to beat Psarra 7-3 to move to the round of 16, but about 1 hour later is eliminated by Naomi Folkard of Great Britain.
The most exciting match of the session is between 16 year old Ricardo Soto from Chile:
and Anton Prilepov of Belarus:
Soto is seeded 13th after an excellent 675 points in the qualification round, but Prilepov gives him all he can handle. They tie 27-27 in the first set, Prilepov wins set 2 27-26, they tie again 27-27 in set 3 and Soto wins set 4 29-27 for a score of 4-4. In the 5th set, Soto scores 9's on his first two arrows to take a 1 point lead as Prilepov scores an 8 and a 9. Soto gets another 9 on his 3rd arrow to score 27. This means that Prilepov has to get a 10 on his final shot - and he does to tie the score at 5 points each. This brings up the seta de morte - the arrow of death. One shot for each archer - closest to the center wins. Prilepov goes first and gets a 10 right on the edge of the 9 ring. Soto calmly walks up and puts his arrow less than 3cm from the center to win the match!
Up until this point, we have mostly been watching people from the middle of the bracket that are ranked between 15 and 50. But the next match features 5th seed Atuna Das from India:
He is matched against 60th seed Jitbahadur Muktan of Nepal. He is substantially better than everyone that we've seen so far. Here is a picture of his worst round:
Das wins in three straight sets 29-26, 29-24 and 30-26. His 88 points is easily the best score seen in this session. Surprisingly, he eventually loses to Seungyun Lee from Korea in the round of 8.
The Rio zoo is quite close to the sombodromo so after the event, we decide to head over there for a little while despite the mid-day heat. We know that we need to change to Linha 2 at the Central station so it is slightly easier to walk to the Central station and just get on Linha 2 to start with rather than going back to Praça Onze, riding one stop on Linha 1 and then changing trains to Linha 2. We get back to Praça Onze station and ask one of the volunteers which way the Central station is. She gets a "why would you want to do this?" look on her face and points along a street and says that it is about a 15 minute walk in this direction. She said that we should hide our watches, rings and wallets/purses. About this time, we start to think that we should deal with the hassle of changing train lines.
We get to Central station, change lines and go two stops and then get off. This station is on an elevated platform, but we don't see anything that obviously looks like a zoo. We ask one of the volunteers who tells us to go out of the station, turn left and cross the first major street we come to. The zoo is in a park on the opposite side of the street. She also tells us to secure our possessions. At the entrance to the park, we see a sign pointing to the zoo straight ahead. But after walking for quite a while, we see almost no people and no zoo. A man comes over and asks us where we are going. When we tell him the zoo, he points us along a road to the right followed by a left. After about a mile, we start to see the zoo in the distance and realize that we're entering through a side road. We also see dozens of stray cats lounging in the grass or in the bushes. Also along this road are people selling ice cream from push carts and others renting bicycle powered vehicles.
The zoo is very inexpensive - 10 reals or $3.30/person. It also looks totally run down. As we walk around, it becomes clear that this is a circa-1960 sort of zoo with all of the animals in small cages. Here are a couple of my better pictures:
He is matched against 60th seed Jitbahadur Muktan of Nepal. He is substantially better than everyone that we've seen so far. Here is a picture of his worst round:
Das wins in three straight sets 29-26, 29-24 and 30-26. His 88 points is easily the best score seen in this session. Surprisingly, he eventually loses to Seungyun Lee from Korea in the round of 8.
The Rio zoo is quite close to the sombodromo so after the event, we decide to head over there for a little while despite the mid-day heat. We know that we need to change to Linha 2 at the Central station so it is slightly easier to walk to the Central station and just get on Linha 2 to start with rather than going back to Praça Onze, riding one stop on Linha 1 and then changing trains to Linha 2. We get back to Praça Onze station and ask one of the volunteers which way the Central station is. She gets a "why would you want to do this?" look on her face and points along a street and says that it is about a 15 minute walk in this direction. She said that we should hide our watches, rings and wallets/purses. About this time, we start to think that we should deal with the hassle of changing train lines.
We get to Central station, change lines and go two stops and then get off. This station is on an elevated platform, but we don't see anything that obviously looks like a zoo. We ask one of the volunteers who tells us to go out of the station, turn left and cross the first major street we come to. The zoo is in a park on the opposite side of the street. She also tells us to secure our possessions. At the entrance to the park, we see a sign pointing to the zoo straight ahead. But after walking for quite a while, we see almost no people and no zoo. A man comes over and asks us where we are going. When we tell him the zoo, he points us along a road to the right followed by a left. After about a mile, we start to see the zoo in the distance and realize that we're entering through a side road. We also see dozens of stray cats lounging in the grass or in the bushes. Also along this road are people selling ice cream from push carts and others renting bicycle powered vehicles.
The zoo is very inexpensive - 10 reals or $3.30/person. It also looks totally run down. As we walk around, it becomes clear that this is a circa-1960 sort of zoo with all of the animals in small cages. Here are a couple of my better pictures:
This is an Andean condor. The picture does not do justice to exactly how big this bird is. The Andean condor is the world's largest and heaviest flying bird. His wingspan is 10-11 feet and males like this one weight 24-33 lbs (that's 3.3 m and 11-15 kg for those advanced beings who understand the metric system)! The condor is native to Chile so here is a more local bird:
This is a scarlet macaw. They live in the Amazon region in northwestern Brazil. While it is likely that both of these animals have had their wings clipped, both birds are likely to be in cages, even in modern zoos. Here is an animal that should have more room to move around:
This is a brown Capuchin monkey from the Pantanal region of Brazil just to the northwest of Rio. It is tough to see intelligent animals like this one just sitting in a cage for days on end without much room to move around and little to no stimulation. Beth looks at a sign with the history of the zoo and finds that it was started in 1888 and has gone bankrupt 3 times in it's history. Compared to a modern zoo like we visit in San Francisco, it is a little depressing to walk around. It's also a little sketchy as the back wall of the zoo backs up to a favela. After an hour or so, we head for home.
I work on pins and rest my tired legs for a little while, then we head out to dinner. Tonight, we go to a restaurant called Azteca which is supposed to serve authentic Mexican cuisine. We order and the waitress brings us two bottles. She speaks excellent English and tells us that the lighter colored one is medium spicy and the dark one is very hot. Since Sean has been known to each ghost chilies and scotch bonnets (two of the hottest chilies), he takes this as a direct challenge and puts a bunch of the medium sauce on his quesadillas and tentatively takes a bite. He says that he can hardly taste any spice so he goes to the hot sauce - same result. Our waitress has apparently been watching this drama because quickly comes over and tells us that Brazilians can hardly tolerate any spice in their food. They don't even put black pepper on the table. Despite the lack of spice, the food is very tasty and we leave happy.
Tomorrow, we are off to Men's basketball. Until then, stay tuned!
This is a scarlet macaw. They live in the Amazon region in northwestern Brazil. While it is likely that both of these animals have had their wings clipped, both birds are likely to be in cages, even in modern zoos. Here is an animal that should have more room to move around:
This is a brown Capuchin monkey from the Pantanal region of Brazil just to the northwest of Rio. It is tough to see intelligent animals like this one just sitting in a cage for days on end without much room to move around and little to no stimulation. Beth looks at a sign with the history of the zoo and finds that it was started in 1888 and has gone bankrupt 3 times in it's history. Compared to a modern zoo like we visit in San Francisco, it is a little depressing to walk around. It's also a little sketchy as the back wall of the zoo backs up to a favela. After an hour or so, we head for home.
I work on pins and rest my tired legs for a little while, then we head out to dinner. Tonight, we go to a restaurant called Azteca which is supposed to serve authentic Mexican cuisine. We order and the waitress brings us two bottles. She speaks excellent English and tells us that the lighter colored one is medium spicy and the dark one is very hot. Since Sean has been known to each ghost chilies and scotch bonnets (two of the hottest chilies), he takes this as a direct challenge and puts a bunch of the medium sauce on his quesadillas and tentatively takes a bite. He says that he can hardly taste any spice so he goes to the hot sauce - same result. Our waitress has apparently been watching this drama because quickly comes over and tells us that Brazilians can hardly tolerate any spice in their food. They don't even put black pepper on the table. Despite the lack of spice, the food is very tasty and we leave happy.
Tomorrow, we are off to Men's basketball. Until then, stay tuned!
Steps for the day - 12,744
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