Tacit

Former soccer star and legend Pele served Friday as the guide inside the historic Maracana soccer stadium to attract the votes of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) commission for the 2016 Olympic Games in the candidate city of Rio de Janeiro.

    Juggling, passing balls and even signing memorabilia, the ambassador to Rio’s Olympic candidacy showed the inspectors around the stadium’s facilities.

    Pele sat down and had an in-depth conversion with the president of the commission and ex-athlete of the Moroccan team of Nawal El Moutawekel.

    Pele was quoted as referring to the IOC representatives as “children” in relation to their enjoyment and fun had at Maracana.

    The commission will head next to Madrid, Spain, where they will evaluate the country’s capacity to hold the 2016 Games.

    According to Pele, “the commission was quite impressed. They told me that they had no idea that Rio de Janeiro was so wonderful. They said that they want to come back to visit apart from word.”

    The commission has already visited the candidate cities of Chicago and Tokyo. The announcement of the host city will be made on October 2 of this year.

Olympic runners-up Brazil outlasted Serbia 3-2 here on Sunday for their eighth FIVB World League title.

    With the 22-25, 25-23, 25-22, 23-25 and 15-12 victory, the Brazilians tied the record of the Italians, who have also been crowned for eight times in the annual volleyball tournament founded in 1990.

    ”It’s a lot of joy. For us it is good to come up here and win, since we didn’t play so well in Brazil and lost the title last year, ” said Brazil head coach Bernardo Rezende.

    ”I think that this generation still make a lots of mistakes. I hope they will learn from this competition and we will keep working and try to keep being competitive, that’s our goal for this cycle.”

    In the tiebreaker, Brazil overcame an early 6-3 deficit to go up 12-9, thanks to Endres Murilo’s storming serving which lifted his team to a decisive 4-0 run. Ivan Miljkovic pulled Serbia within 14-12, only to find Giba drive a ball off the block out of bounds to seal the victory in the marathon match.

    ”We are very sad for not winning in front of this wonderful crowd and because we didn’t bring joy to the whole nation,” said Serbia head coach Igor Kolakovic. “During the fifth set, it seemed like we could win this match, but they played even better and defended a lot of hard balls.”

    Neves Vissoto notched up game-high 29 points for Brazil with Murilo and Saatkamp Lucas adding 15 apiece.

    Serbia started well in front of a full-capacity home crowd of 22, 600, jumping to a 5-2 lead in the opening set, while Brazil immediately answered with three straight points to tie it at 5-all.