David Owen, who worked for 20 years for the Financial Times and is now Chief Columnist at insidethegames.biz and Mark Staniusz sports writer at catch-22sports.com answer this question.
In fact we do not know how many tickets were actually sold, as many tickets were sold to middlemen and we do not know how many of them were actually sold, but latest estimates indicate that about 1.5 million out of 2.5 million tickets were sold.
One major issue is the way that disabled people are treated in Brazil itself. As Mark pointed out: “Brazil treats its disabled people in a certain way that is not conducive to encouraging sport [for them] in the country. We are talking about limited special bathrooms and inability for people in wheelchairs to get on buses, so there is a kind of stigma that is plaguing the actual games and its success.”
But the major issue that both Mark and David agreed on was the simple truth that the Brazilian economy is in trouble. Even the £2.30 tickets were too expensive for many. As Mark pointed out: “Although the ticket price is about the same price as it costs to go the movies, that doesn't mean that Rio citizens can afford to attend the games.” David said: “…People just don’t have the disposable income that we are used to in the West. The other factor is the way the Olympics and Paralympics are billed as part of the same event. The reason it happens this way is because there is absolutely no way you could really justify building the facilities that you’d need for a multisport event just for the Paralympics… the priority is always going to be the Olympic games rather than the Paralympics.”
The unstable political situation is also undoubtedly another factor. Mark put it this way: “The political situation was also present during the Olympics, and they weren't exactly a tremendous success either….When they chose Rio it was impossible to predict the current political situation. But I think that it is important for the IOC to remember that when they choose a country to host the Olympics, they are also choosing a country to host the Paralympics. And they need to choose cities that have the infrastructure and the guts to be able to handle both events.” David commented: “When the IOC awarded Brazil with hosting the Olympics in 2009, Rio was like a boom town, you couldn't invest fast enough….You can’t really expect the organising committee to foresee the scale of the economic downturn that would happen. In the first 2 or 3 years, everything went really well. Sponsorship sales were outstripping London. When the economy fell out of bed, everything ground to a halt.
One might ask, why not downsize the event? David commented: “It is complex, sometimes when you change construction plans, you sometimes end up adding costs rather than reducing costs. The answer is that when a city signs up to put on the Olympics, it's like basically signing a contract. Unless they have the IOC’s permission, they cannot reduce the number of events. The Brazilians indicated a few weeks ago that they might like to pull out of the paralympics, but they were unable to because they signed a contract.”
The IOC has now brought in ‘Agenda 2020’ and one of the points is cost reduction. They have taken about a billion dollars out of the costs of the Tokyo games. Rio just came too soon, it would have been very difficult to apply that to Rio. What can be argued is that in 2009, Rio was very much a high risk choice. They chose Rio over Chicago, Tokyo and Madrid. It was an adventurous choice, a lot of us found that it was quite refreshing at the time that they had done so, but with the benefit of hindsight it is fair to say that they took a big risk. And to some extent I think they’ve paid for that.”
