Olympic Golf Course Finished, Protest Group Sets Up Shop
/Architect Gil Hanse confirmed on Morning Drive that the Olympic golf course in Rio is intact, with no design changes. It is now growing in.
From Ryan Lavner's report:
Hanse said Monday on Golf Channel’s “Morning Drive” that construction on the 2016 Olympics course is done and that “we’re now in full grow-in mode.”
“By all accounts it’s going well,” he said. “We’re still hopeful – the project has obviously had a lot of setbacks here and there along the way, so I can’t expect that it’s going to be completely smooth going forward.
“But we’re all enthused; the design is intact. They didn’t ask us to make any changes, so we’re proud of what’s being built.”
Meanwhile the Washington Post's Dom Phillips reports the latest unrest in Rio, ranging from bus fare concerns to "Nazi cops" to the Olympic golf course. The group has a protest page on Facebook, including video of police breaking up their makeshift home on a highway median and a musical performance that'll make your month.
Phillips writes of the upheaval:
On Jan. 6, Municipal Guards — an unarmed city police force — came to dismantle a homemade shelter the demonstrators had built. A tug-of-war developed as protesters clung onto it. During the scuffles, a student, Elson Soares Jr., 30, was handcuffed and forced into a police car where he was repeatedly hit in the face with a baton by a female guard, who broke his tooth. At one point, a rubber bullet was fired.
Soares said by phone that the female guard continued hitting him in the genital area and his legs as he was driven to a police station. “I thought it was a heavy torture,” he said.
The protesters filmed the attack and put the footage on their facebook page. The guards ransacked their camp.
