There is great expectation for futebol fans, and a great media frenzy, too, with much attention focussed on Brazil's supposed lack of preparedness for the tournament, its badly built new roads and bridges, its corruption and favelas and the lack of security of Brazil's cities, and so forth, on and on.
Could she in eight years reverse the engines of inequality and corruption, bridge the divides and enliven the democracy?
Just this past June, the World Bank canceled $1.2 billion in financing for the much-needed Padma Bridge because of corruption at a high-level within the government.
Many in China have attributed the recent spate of bridge collapses to corruption, and online reaction to the latest collapse was scathing.
Instead, the event is shaping up as a glaring embarrassment, with problems that include missed construction deadlines, unsanitary conditions at the athletes' village, the shooting of two tourists, a collapsed pedestrian bridge and accusations of official corruption.
Its implementation will provide an interesting measure of the health of the Chinese political economy: can the government avoid massive corruption and the bridge-to-nowhere projects that characterized Japanese stimulus investments during the nineteen-nineties?
The World Bank has scrapped a deal to pay for a big bridge because of its suspicions of corruption.
Annual donations were accepted by May's Maidenhead constituency party between 2003 and 2006 despite Guardian investigations that highlighted corruption allegations levelled at David Mabey's bridge manufacturing business.
The flood of public monies into private hands is leaving China littered with such jetsam of corruption: half-built office towers, unfinished bridges and roads to nowhere.
The human costs of such corruption may emerge only later, when bridges crumple and large buildings collapse, as they have in the earthquake zones of Turkey, Iran and China.
