Athletes from 206 nations and a refugee
team are in Brazil to compete in 31 sports and be watched by a global audience
of billions.
The build-up has been dominated by a
Russian doping scandal, the Zika virus and issues with the city's security,
infrastructure and venues.
But it is time for the sporting action to
take centre stage as the first Olympics in South America begin.
The Games officially take place between 5
and 21 August, but they have actually already started.
The opening ceremony is at midnight BST on
Friday night but the action kicked off two days ago with the women's football.
Defending Olympic men's tennis champion
Andy Murray will be Great Britain's flag bearer inside Rio's Maracana stadium
on Friday.
An estimated three billion people will
watch the ceremony, which has taken five years to produce and includes 300
dancers, 5,000 volunteers and 12,000 costumes.
There will be 10,500 athletes from a
record 207 nations competing in Rio, including the Refugee Olympic Team, while
it will be the first time Kosovo and South Sudan have taken part in the Games.
With 554 athletes, the United States has
the largest Olympic team, but spare a thought for 100m runner Etimoni Timuani,
who is the only athlete from the South Pacific nation of Tuvalu.
The build-up to Rio has been overshadowed
by events in Russia, after the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) report into
state-sponsored doping in the country.
It seemed at one stage that no Russian
athletes would be at the Games after Wada recommended a blanket ban.
But the International Olympic Committee
(IOC) said individual sporting federations must rule on whether Russians can
compete. Their decisions were then ratified by the Court of Arbitration for
Sport (Cas) before a three-man IOC panel made the final decision.
On Thursday, the IOC cleared 271 Russian
athletes to compete in Rio of the country's original entry list of 389, though
the country's track and field athletes have been barred by athletics' governing
body.
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