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Rio de Janeiro

Rio de Janeiro is a city in South America's pre-eminent natural-resource-and-poor-people-flush megacountry, Brazil. The International Olympic Committee voted this week to let the city host the Summer Olympic Games there in 2016, a mere seven years from now. South America has never hosted an Olympic Games. Coincidentally, Rio de Janeiro will also host the football/soccer World Cup in 2014 -- a notably larger event to anyone inhabiting the area nether regions outside the Universe-balancing axis of the United States of America.

Rio, as it is known in party travel vernacular, is a provocative choice to host the Olympics, just as Beijing, China, was a unique choice for the 2008 Games. Largely known for Carnival (also known as Mardi Gras without the residual racism) and that slightly ominous Christ Redeemer statue, Rio has also entered the cultural canon by way of the reductionist (to tears, because it's so brilliant) "City of God" of earlier this decade. Portrayed in that film (and in this week's New Yorker magazine), is the reality on the ground. A huge swath of the city's poorest areas overtaken in crippling fashion by crime, gangs, and the drug trade. These portraits do not only expose life in Rio, they expose the desperation many slums face throughout the world. Rio is not the first city with these problems to host the Olympics. The 1980 Games were hosted by Los Angeles. Though an American city of the First World, LA faces the same types of issues in its poor neighborhoods.

Casual media consumers will note that the final decision to award the Olympic Games to Rio were was the result of endless internal politicking and, perhaps, the sympathy for a continent that is home to a vast swath of the world's people but has never hosted an Olympics. But what will emerge from that back room process is a look at a country and its cultural center that are still in the midst of its growing pains. Brazil is not yet China -- kicking around regional counterparts and pulling the puppet strings of the U.S. But crucially for the Olympics, it is also not EuroAmerica. In fact, it was once an outpost and colonized portion of EuroAmerica -- unlike any other city to host the games before.

After centuries of bending to pressure from the North Americans and Europeans even after they stopped directly controlling the place, and struggling to fill the power vacuum with anyone respectable in the meantime, the gracious Centers of the Universe have bestowed one of their own jewels of relevance onto the former outer provinces in the form of the Olympics. While it's unlikely that Brazil will be eager to throw any of their gang leaders, or even poor people (d.b.a. the vast majority of the population) into the direct glare of the limelight, the mere fact that the Olympics are willing to pack up their things and move the show to a city that was previously a mere pawn on the chess board of world supremacy is a step that reflects the increasingly crowded world stage. Fittingly, at the close of the 2012 Olympics the flag will pass from London -- home of the crown that once sought the prize of outright global dominance and all that was supposedly civilized -- to Rio. The message: There's finally more about the place to nail down than exotic Ipanemans.