Feature

Rio 2016 round-up: August 18

Each day we take a look at the main stadia and ticketing news from the 2016 Olympic Games.

Australian decathlete Cedric Dubler has described the crowd numbers at the Olympics as "a little bit of a let down" as he became the latest athlete to comment on poor attendances.

Speaking after the last of Wednesday's events, Dubler said the experience of competing at the Games was not as he had anticipated, particularly after he saw sell-out crowds at the London Games of 2012.

"It was a little bit different to what I expected,” he said. "The atmosphere wasn't quite what I expected it to be. It feels like an empty stadium. Obviously there are a lot of people out there, but compared to other competitions I've seen where London has a full crowd of 110,000 people and we have an empty 55,000 seat stadium, it's not what I expected it to be.”

Meanwhile, a Brazilian campaign group has accused Rio de Janeiro’s authorities of forcing the homeless out of major tourist areas to hide the city’s poverty from visitors during the Olympic Games.

A spokesman for the Project Ruas advocacy group said that while security forces are offering to take the homeless to shelters during the day, they are being moved against their will overnight.

“Homeless people are being coercively removed. We have received reports of beatings,” Project Ruas spokesman Murillo Sabino told the Thomson Reuters news agency. “There is a sense they (government officials) are trying to clean the streets so Rio appears to have less poverty.”

Rio authorities said the homeless were being accommodated in shelters on a voluntary basis.

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