Bem-vindos!

Jogos Olímpicos de Verão de 2016, officially known as the Games of the XXXI Olympiad, and commonly known as Rio 2016, are about to commence this coming Friday.

The Olympics and me, you must know, we have quite some history. It all started in Athens in 2004, where I (student, 22y) met that American guy (show-off, around 70y). We were standing there by the road forever with absolutely nothing to do. (Yes kids, watching a marathon is pure excitement: hours of travel and waiting, followed by 20 seconds of watching sweaty guys run, while taking some really badly moved pictures of them.) So we ended up chatting casually. One word led to another, and suddenly there he was - with pride written all over his face - bragging about how he hadn't missed any Olympic Games since Tokyo*. Myself, being an insanely competitive creature, automatically understood it as a bet, and promised myself I would beat his streak. It's on, mister!

* - Summer Olympics that is (as much as I love curling, skiing with a rifle, and freezing outside with zero visibility in general, Winter Olympics don't count)

This inner bet has had both good and bad effects on my life. The worst of all is clearly all that broccoli I have to eat now in order to live long enough to attend the Olympics for 40+ years. The best one is that I actually get to see lots of live sports! Athens was where a single trip transformed into a lifelong plan. Beijing was an absolute blast, and my only regret is a poor choice of language for the blog - a mistake I managed to rectify four years later in London.

Solidarity t-shirt against human rights violations

A record number of countries are participating in a record number of sports. More than 10,500 athletes from 206 National Olympic Committees, including first time entrants Kosovo and South Sudan, are scheduled to take part. With 306 sets of medals, the games will feature 28 Olympic sports — including rugby sevens and golf, which were added by the International Olympic Committee in 2009. These sporting events will take place at 33 venues in the host city and (football only) at 5 venues in the cities of São Paulo (Brazil's largest city), Belo Horizonte, Salvador, Brasília (Brazil's capital), and Manaus.

The host city of Rio de Janeiro was announced at the 121st IOC Session held in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 2 October 2009. Rio will become the first South American city to host the Summer Olympics. These will be the first games to be held in a Portuguese-speaking country, the first to be held entirely during the host country's winter season (the 2000 games began on 15 September – five days before the Southern Hemisphere's spring equinox), the first since 1968 to be held in Latin America, and the first since 2000 (and third overall) to be held in the Southern Hemisphere.

These will be the first Summer Olympic Games under the IOC presidency of Thomas Bach, who has recently been presented the unique opportunity to kick out all Russian athletes after it had been proven the government had been orchestrating a rather successful doping scheme. Luckily, suddenly he remembered he had plenty of business links to Mother Russia and a beautiful office in Moscow, thus most Russian athletes will participate.

За здоровье!

(Fun fact: a few dozen Russian fans came to Sheremetyevo Airport to wish their athletes the best of luck. The media later revealed each of those fans were paid to be there. Well played.)

But I digress. In roughly 72 hours I'm jumping onto my Brexit Airways flight to São Paulo, only to immediately continue to Iguaçu Falls, renowned as much for their overwhelming beauty as they are for the sheer size, a proud member of so-called New 7 Wonders of Nature. Two nights there to recharge the batteries, and on Sunday afternoon I'll land in Rio and dive straight into the madness, as you can see in more detail following the link "My Schedule" in the section "Useful Links" on the right.

In the same column, you'll also notice something called "My Audio Tapes". For the first time in my life, I'll try to complement whatever I write here with short daily podcasts, thanks to a brilliant new platform called TapeWrite. I'll cover both little anecdotes related to my personal adventure, as well as big stories the whole world of sports is talking about. So whether you have any particular questions regarding the Games (ask away in your comments), or just a random affinity to mumbling individuals with a Soviet accent, do tune in! Here's the first one: