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Rio mayor blames Olympics organizing committee for problems

Rio de Janeiro mayor Eduardo Paes
Rio de Janeiro’s Mayor Eduardo Paes attends a press conference of Two Years to Go to the Rio 2016 Olympics Opening Ceremony on August 4, 2014 in Rio de Janeiro. (Getty)

Just days after his controversial quip that Australian athletes might have felt more at home in their Olympic accommodations if a kangaroo had been placed outside, Rio de Janeiro’s mayor has placed the blame for the problems in the athletes’ village on the city’s Olympics organizing committee.

“The athletes’ village was ready. Then the organizing committee took charge for three months, and there were extremely serious management problems. During those three months, people intruded into the apartments and a lot of things were stolen,” said Rio mayor Eduardo Paes in an interview with a Sao Paulo newspaper picked up by AFP.

“The doors were left half-open. The organizing committee was careless, objectively speaking,” Paes said.

[Related: How Rio is helping its stray cats and dogs leading up to the Olympics]

Paes, who has been in office since 2008, maintains he only learned of the problems in the village late last week and that Brazilians were not the ones at fault.

“It wasn’t a Brazilian in charge of the Olympics village. Only foreigners,” said Paes. “At least people can’t say the Brazilians are disorganized. The boss was Mario Cilenti.”

Cilenti is Argentinian, so it perhaps comes as little surprise that the embattled mayor would try and pin the blame on him when you consider the contentious relationship that the two South American neighbors maintain with one another.

It’s been reported that Cilenti has since been relieved of his duties as executive director of the athletes’ villages, although there’s been no official confirmation of this from the Olympics committee.

The problems with the village – which range from exposed wiring to leaky plumbing and clogged toilets – first came to light Monday, when the Australian delegation announced it would be staying in a hotel because its accommodations were uninhabitable. Meanwhile, the Italian delegation decided to take matters into its own hands, hiring contractors to complete its unfinished block of apartments.

[Related: Olympics media village built on ‘sacred’ burial site]

The committee since launched its own repair effort, hiring 600 plumbers to make emergency repairs to the village. Rio 2016 has stated that all problems with the village have now been taken care of.

However, even that was not without controversy, with Brazil’s labor ministry stating that the emergency hires called in by the committee lacked proper working conditions and contracts.

The mayor’s comments are just the latest round in an escalating game of passing the buck that earlier this week saw the organizing committee blame the problems in the village on sabotage by “unhappy workers.”