Rio's Mayor Now A Passionate Defender Of Golf (This Week)

Rio de Janeiro's mayor Eduardo Paes, who in recent months has sought to distance himself from Rio's Olympic golf course and even suggested it never would have been built if it were up to him, has seen the light. This week anyway.

Touring journalists around the course as it grows in post-construction, Paes and his team came armed with evidence that the site was, once in fact, mostly concrete and that the course will actually increase habitat area for critters.

The unbylined story features many ground shots from the bizarro course tour, though it's very clearly in the grow-in phase where bunkers are not maintainted and turf is the focus.

'Does this look like an environmental crime?' he exclaimed, arms akimbo, as he led reporters over the course's spongy grass. Earlier, Paes projected aerial photos from the 1980s apparently showing what's now the golf course dotted with concrete structures.

Environmentalists contend that hardy subtropical vegetation had since retaken the area and that before the bulldozers descended it had become home to several endangered species, including species of butterflies and frogs.

'He (Paes) thinks that all green's the same,' said Jean Carlos Novaes, a member of the Golfe Para Quem (Golf For Whom) group that has been protesting outside the site for months. 'But non-native grass is just not the same thing as the native ecosystem.'

Novaes, who was among a small group of protesters on Wednesday, insisted it was unnecessary to build a new course in the first place, since Rio already has two other golf courses - despite golf's status in Brazil as an unpopular sport played almost exclusively by the moneyed elite. The owner of one of the courses has said he wrote to authorities to offer it up for the Olympics but never heard back.

 I guess this would be a tough time to explain to him that the ball goes too far and that the other courses simply were not an option?