It took seven days before I found the only waiter at the Leme Light bar on the Rua Gustavo Sampaio in Rio de Janeiro who could speak some English. It took him seven days before he bothered to speak English to me.
I had been a late-night regular, a stop for a post-work beer on the road from the metro station to my hotel on the Copacabana.
I’d ask for a “Brahma” or “Antarctica”. A 600ml bottle of one or the other would arrive gloved in a cooler with a glass just bigger than a shot glass.
I’d order the codfish balls. Every night. They were spectacular and cheap. On the seventh night, my waiter, who had Gareth Bale monkey ears and a snarl, smiled: “You like balls?” Ah. Yes. Indeed.
He pointed at my Paralympic accreditation. I asked him if he liked the Paralympics.
“No. They s***.”
Ah. On the TV, Fluminense were playing someone. Again. There is always football on in the bars and botecos of Rio.
The Paralympics were something that was happening in another part of the city, 90 minutes travel by public transport. My waiter had seen some of the Games in between football. He stopped talking and walked away, leaving me to my own devices. My device was an iPhone 6, but everyone back in SA was asleep. There was no one to talk to.
Rio can be a lonely place when you're the only SA journalist in the city to cover the Games. The crowd of SA journalists who had been there for the Olympics were replaced by me for the Paralympics. No one else came, neither print, online, radio or TV. Only two print journalists had bothered to apply for accreditation and both of them work for Independent Media. TV and photographs were taken care of by three men, two of them working for Team SA and a sponsor. For the Olympics, Team SA sent three media aides and two in-house writers. For the Paralympic team, they scaled down to just one media liaison. A word of thanks to that liaison, Shane Keohane, who was superb, working endlessly to help me.
On the Monday before the Games started, I had resigned myself to not going to what would be my fifth Paralympics. These are hard times for the media. I wrote about how disappointed I was about that. A generous benefactor got involved. Two days later I was in Rio. There were stories to be told, the praises of athletes to be sung. I was alone in Rio with codfish balls and beer, but had the company and joy of watching SA Paralympians who deserved more than to be dismissed as “s***”.
The Star