The bleeding obvious popped up, as it were, while I was watching a taxi driver take advantage of the stalled traffic to empty his bladder on the side of the road near Ipanema Beach. Brazil is part of the developing world, and the Olympic movement has done absolutely the right thing by coming here. Indeed, the Games should get out more often.
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Rio 2016: damage, pollution and theft
The Rio Olympics hasn't begun, but already there's been a wave of problems.
Shock horror, this was not the only act of public urination seen hereabouts. From the Herald's pre-Games hotel in Copacabana, a gentleman was spotted watering the beach volleyball surface.
If this happened in Sydney, the offender would be an NRL player on his way to redemption via the local court, the front page and the Integrity Unit. We are so precious.
Sydneysiders can remember their relief and joy when the 2000 Games went off so well; can they also remember the perfectionist mass neurosis that preceded them, the fear that the world would judge us badly if a train had to wait more than a minute between Strathfield and Lidcombe?
Here in Brazil, workmen with cigarettes dangling from their lips are still wandering about with pieces of galvanised fence looking for somewhere to erect them or taking them home for resale. Bags of rubbish, like luggage at Latin American airports, are waiting on roadsides to be claimed. The logistics are not running on sleek rails.
Hundreds of big green things that could be barricades or housing materials are stacked on the beachfront. A navy boat patrols the waters in a sign of reassurance, or its opposite. That most tired of buzz expressions – "It is what it is" – seems, for once, entirely appropriate.
The Olympics have only dipped their toe into a developing-world democracy once before, going to Mexico City in 1968. Aside from ventures into authoritarian China and post-economic miracle South Korea, the Games have been hard to coax out of their first-world bubble.
They have never been to India or Indonesia or the Philippines, nor to the Middle East. Africa and the Caribbean have been over-represented in great achievements in the Olympic arena but untrusted as hosts. Australia has had the Games twice, but areas representing two-thirds of the world's population have not had them at all.
Are the Olympics struggling for relevance? Only perhaps on streets where Jarryd Hayne's next move is all-important. Out in those parts of the world where Hayne is, remarkably, unknown, a different story unfolds. The Olympics would be struggling for relevance if they didn't come to Brazil.
Withdrawals by basketball, tennis and golf superstars are not a blow to the Games, but just what they needed. The prospect of Brazil, where control-obsessed celebrity sportspeople could only envisage the potential for chaos and disease, sorted the sheep from the goats.
The uncommitted stayed away, as is their right, and the participants have been whittled back to those who should be here: athletes for whom this is the one big chance, the quadrennial dream. Far from weakening the Olympics, the absence of all those day-in, day-out professionals has purified the event. Those who are here, want to be here.
Rio is not London or Sydney, and it is certainly not Beijing. In the days leading up to the opening ceremony, the prevailing atmosphere is of a busy city, preoccupied with its problems, suddenly realising something big is happening and then not being too fussed about it either way.
There are no orchestrated parades or licked-clean thoroughfares. Outside the four main Olympic precincts the city appears to be taking the Games in its stride, declining to dress itself up in banners and flags.
Probably spooked by what they have heard about petty crime, terrorism and public urination, the hundreds of thousands of tourists reportedly here are keeping a low profile. Out on Copacabana, aside from the occasional very tall person wearing a national tracksuit, the majority of boulevardiers are Brazilian families.
If the Western world wants to hold its nose, the carioca response is not to try too hard. Which is refreshing.
Outside the bubble, partner-sponsors are not chewing up the landscape. On the surface, these appear to be the least-choreographed, least-corporate, least-commercialised, least-desperate-to-please Olympics in recent memory.
Some might think that is a sign of decline, but it is also a sign of the Games reaching into the world where people live. When the International Olympic Committee voted to come to Brazil seven years ago, the country was riding an economic wave of rising oil and commodity prices. The Brazil of 2016 is not what was anticipated and the economic legacy of holding an Olympic Games has been over-sold (when has it not?); but the Games and the athletes will be a success if they embrace the fact that this is where a serious global movement should be coming, and if every detail does not go to plan, a surprise needn't be an unpleasant one.
What constantly startles is the natural beauty of the city. Christ the Redeemer came late, less than a century ago. He was pre-dated by the splendour of Guanabara Bay and the beaches of Barra, the offshore islands and the granite mountains and cliff faces that rise and plunge between neighbourhoods.
Like Hobart, Rio is a city where there is cheap real estate with great views. All this beauty, too, is taken in the cariocas' stride. If the relieving taxi driver had turned to face the other way, he would have had a splendid vista of Ipanema and the south Atlantic. He didn't care to; this is his town, and he sees it every day.
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