“Yeah, things have got better. They’ve got better for tourists, Rio’s image has improved internationally, great! This is good. But for me and my people that work on the beach here, we haven’t seen any improvement,” his tone shifts down a few gears, “in fact, all these guys who had their huts moved because of the stadium, haven’t received one centavo in compensation yet. All these pipes we use for the showers have been destroyed and it’s my friends who will foot the bill. Not the IOC. It costs R$1000 (£235) just to put a new one in. So it actually hurt us more than it helped us.”

“It really went sooo much better than I expected!” Alessandra Amaral tells me over the phone. The 43-year-old mum of three, who thought that it was “going to be shit” back at the beginning of August was made to eat her words. “I thought the transport wouldn’t work and that there would be huge security problems. But the Olympic spirit infected us Cariocas.”

Occupying military forces often talk about converting ‘the grey zone’, the undecided people, those unsure as to what is best for their invaded country. Rio 2016 seemed to win over these fence-sitters fairly swiftly.

“The opening ceremony was an important turning point, it was wonderful! Our World Cup opening ceremony was terrible and we were scared about being embarrassed again, right at the beginning of things. But it was spectacular! Beautiful! And it filled our hearts with pride.” Enthused Alessandra.

After originally not buying any tickets because of safety and transport concerns she made a few trips to the Olympic park, with the highlight being taking her 14-year-old daughter to see the synchronised swimming team final.

The biggest concern before the Games was security, and this was always going to be a tightrope for Rio to walk. While the Olympics didn’t pass ‘without incident’, the most shocking incidents were not the ones most people heard about.

It seems perhaps that it should have been Brazilian women, not foreign athletes, who should have been most concerned about their security. But of course, little of this made it into the international press. Brazilian maids don’t have the media profile of a former reality TV star like Ryan Lochte. And so the real security narrative of Rio – that host nations should be wary of international sportsmen who feel they can grab whatever they want, riding roughshod over local laws people in the process – was lost in a frenzy of confected fear about athletes’ safety.

To find out more about the sporting side of things, I caught up again with Raff Giglio, who trained two boxers from the favela of Vidigal to compete at Rio 2016 without any help from the government or the city.

When I asked him if Brazil might use this moment to produce more medal winning athletes, he was hesitant. He doesn’t think that the money that they do have is being used in the right way.

Raff was totally against Brazil hosting the Games for financial and social reasons and nothing he saw over the two and a half weeks has changed that view.

“I love the Olympics,” he tells me pointedly “but there are so many things that Brazil doesn’t know how to do.

“Everybody is talking about the opening and closing ceremonies, you see? ‘Ah Brazil knows how to put on a party!’ Exactly, we have the biggest party in the world, Carnival. It lasts 4 days and no one knows how to do this like us. So yeah, Brazil knows how to put on a party, it was a wonderful, beautiful party they put on for the ceremonies.

“Now Brazil needs to learn how to look after its people, and this, it doesn’t know how to do.”

“It seems perhaps that it should have been Brazilian women, not foreign athletes, who should have been most concerned about their security. “

So the verdict: The party was great. But when did someone last come to Rio and not have fun?

More important is the question of what’s next for Rio? Well the city still has to host the Paralympics, while at the same time working through its Olympic hangover. The legacy of the Games, both in terms of the city’s finances and its new infrastructure, looks to be shaky. Rio is broke. Municipal elections are just around the corner in October, but the outgoing mayor, Eduardo Paes, has done all he can to prevent investigations into exactly how and where Olympic money was spent.

Only about half of his infrastructure improvement plans were completed on time and his successor will have to deal with maintaining what the city did inherit. Olympic bus stations have been vandalized this week and the tarmac on the new road out to Barra (where the Olympic Park is located) is already breaking up. It will be a challenge for the new mayor just to maintain these projects.

Back down on the beach, Antonio doesn’t feel like Rio’s politicians care enough to really make the changes that his city and his people need, which, at the end of the day always come back to a lack of basic education.

“Not one politician or Olympic chief came down to see us, came to see what kind of conditions we work in” Antonio laments, “because for them, the beach vendors are just shit, they are only interested in us when the elections are on. That’s when you see them in the suburbs, eating sandwiches and hugging babies from the favela, which is all just deceitful propaganda. People are tricked because they’re idiots.”

Read more from the Olympic Issue here

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