WDIV’s Devin Scillian Talks Rio 2016
Scillian: “There’s going to be controversy, there’s going to be triumph… the Olympics always deliver.”
It’s becomes a sort of local tradition in Detroit that WDIV anchor Devin Scillian reports from the sites of both Summer and Winter Olympics ahead of the games, painting a picture for Detroiters of the culture and conditions athletes will encounter.
“The Olympics never disappoint,” says Scillian on WDET’s Detroit Today. “There’s going to be controversy, there’s going to be triumph… the Olympics always deliver.”
Scillian says he found a lot to love about Rio, the site of the 2016 Summer Olympics. But he also encountered a lot of poverty and gunfire in and around the favelas, or shantytowns.
“There really is this horrendous gap between the haves and have-nots [in Brazil],” says Scillian. He says the favelas are side by side with wealthy neighborhoods, and all Brazilians seem to agree that political corruption runs rampant in the country.
Scillian says there’s a commonly used word for the corruption in Portuguese that means “the workaround,” or “the hustle” as Detroit Today host Stephen Henderson names it.
Scillian says corruption and scandal may plague the Olympic games for the foreseeable future. He sites a recent Dutch report that suggests only non-democratic countries will be bidding on hosting the Olympics in the future.
To hear more of Scillian’s conversation with Henderson, click on the audio player above.
