The crowd cheered loudly on Copacabana beach when Rio de Janeiro was announced as the host city for the 2016 Olympic Games. For the first time, a city in South America would host the biggest sporting competition on the planet. The "Marvellous City", located between the sea and the forest, had seven years to become an Olympic metropolis.
"[Organizing] an Olympics is like a war operation," Leonardo Espíndola, a Rio de Janeiro prosecutor who, in 2016, was the state's representative on the Organising Committee for the Olympic Games, said
