Rio 2016 Lauds Limited Public Investment for Games

(ATR) Rio 2016 chief executive Sidney Levy says at most one percent of the organizing committee budget will come from public funds.

Levy spoke at Rio 2016’s closing press conference, along with President Carlos Nuzman and the entire Rio 2016 executive board. He says that the final budget for Rio 2016 will be $2.8 billion, the initial figure quoted in the 2009 candidature fire to the IOC.

Rio 2016 worked to commit "ourselves to host the Games without the public funds", according to Levy. The need to pay travel grants for Paralympics and uncertainty of ticket sales led to the Organizing Committee to seek funds from the city of Rio de Janeiro and sponsorships through state run companies.

Before the Paralympics, Rio 2016 said they had only sold 200,000 tickets when the Olympic Games ended. Organizers reported a total ticket sale of 2.1 million tickets on the final day of the Games, the second most ever for a Paralympics.

A total of $45.91 million was made available from the city, of which Levy says Rio 2016 has used $9.18 million. Levy pledged that less than one percent of the total budget would come from public money, which corresponds to $28.01 million. Sponsorship money from state run companies totaled $30.61 million.

The final 2016 budget for Rio 2016 will not be completed for the next few months after final employee termination expenses are accounted for. The budget will then be audited in January and published to the Rio 2016 website by February 2017. Levy said only then will the final public investment be known.

"We are very happy to say that the total budget would be $2.8 billion, as [Nuzman] stuck to his first commitment," Levy said. "[The budget] went up and down a lot in the last years, but at the end of the day we did keep the commitment."

As the Rio 2016 Olympics and Paralympics draw to a conclusion, Nuzman said the Games should be celebrated for the history they created and doors opened in the region. He said that historians would look back on the Games favorably, "[overcoming] all predictions or forecasts".

"I know we had political and economic problems in Brazil that impacted us," Nuzman said. "We had to be creative in seeking better solutions and we showed with this a new pathway to the world. This is something that is going to be recorded in the history of the Olympic movement."

Written by Aaron Bauer in Rio de Janeiro.

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