Rio mayor says Brazil will be ready for 2016 Olympics

Описание: (3 Aug 2012) STORYLINE
Officials organising the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, told journalists on Friday that it was still too early to estimate the cost of 2016 Olympic Games.
But the city's mayor, Eduardo Paes, said everything was on course for the project.
"All the projects we agreed on with the International Olympic Committee have already begun," he said during a conference call with journalists and officials in London.
Rio is preparing to host a series of major, international sporting events leading up to the Olympics in 2016, including the Confederations Cup and the World Youth Day in 2013 and the FIFA World Cup in 2014.
The assurances followed complaints about expensive accommodation, heavy traffic and other infrastructure obstacles from delegates to the recent UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio.
Maria Silva Bastos Marques, President of Rio de Janeiro's Municipal Olympic Company, said Rio has the potential to double its current number of hotel rooms, certainly increasing it by at least 50 per cent.
And the Brazilian organisers promised full venues for 2016, vowing to avoid the problem of empty seats that dogged the early days of the London Games, where organisers were confronted with television pictures showing swathes of empty seats.
The gaps have been blamed mostly on officials from sports governing bodies and national Olympic committees not using their allocations of prime seats but it angered many fans, desperate to get tickets but unable to.
A Rio official said 'we hope to do better than London... with a more flexible approach.'
The budget for the London Olympics is 14.5 billion US dollars.


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