RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — "Go to bed," my grandmother implored. "It is late, and these Olympics are very far away."
I was 6 years old, a boy in working-class Sao Paulo already obsessed with the Olympics, staying up to watch the 1988 Games in Seoul, South Korea. Grandmother Lazinha — we called her Zica — was right. It was indeed late for a kid. But what she also meant, I understand now, was that no one living in the Brazil of those days was expected to go very far. Nor was my homeland itself.
Now the games are here, and with that debut comes a renewed sense of possibility and hope — a feeling that perhaps Brazil has finally arrived.