As the 2016 Olympic Games fade into history amidst bright lights and spectacular athletic achievements, countries around the world sit back with their joyous expectations and anticipations either met or forfeited. However, as Olympic history can testify, not every prediction sings of good tidings. Brazil, this year’s host country, contemplates this aspect as each possibility now carries a precarious weight able to send the nation deeper into dire trouble.

The root of such concerns lies within Brazil’s suffering economy. Presently, the country experiences a third consecutive state of recession against a myriad of pressing issues. According to FocusEconomics, an international organization of world economists, Brazil’s GDP, or gross domestic product, faces a steady decline through inflation of currencies and exchange rates, elimination of key industries and relations, and corruption of lucrative corporate standings (i.e. offshore oil industries). Calculations from the Getulio Vargas Foundation, a leading Brazilian school and research institution in the field of business, detail the nation’s economy to shrink by at least 10% by the end of 2016. Coupled with the Zika virus outbreak, uneasiness towards potential terrorist incursions, and the current impeachment scandal in regards to president Dilma Rousseff, Brazil perilously found itself hosting the Olympic Games.

Already, global financial analysts and political organizers describe the attempt of the Olympics to rejuvenate Brazilian conditions as a fizzling, hopeless failure. According to Trading Economics, an international fiscal association, Brazil’s unemployment rate recently hit 11%. Healthcare rates and social spendings at the state and local mediums, which have long struggled for vitality, crawl to lower conditions. Predictions for the nation’s economy to quickly reach its bottom raise striking uncertainties. With other elements, the official pay figure for these Olympic Games, named to exceed the overwhelming $15 billion tabulated originally, still sits without a solid answer. This is to be expected, of course, especially with Rio de Janeiro’s declaration of an official state of financial emergency on July 15th of this year. In other means, prices for the forced infrastructure and public security rack up to relatively unsustainable numbers. With these unmistakable tokens, many critics begin to paint the resemblance of Brazilian conditions to the Great Depression and its tragic circumstances. Most unfortunate, these heavy forecasts ring of the same deterioration that the country pushed aside to host the Games.

Effective conclusions lean into somber regret as the world steps away from the Olympic events. A slew of issues both rising from the past and appearing in the present became cast under the basking of athletic heroism and international collaboration. Now, it returns tenfold to haunt South America’s most economically successful nation, turning the 2016 Olympic Games into the year’s make-or-break wager. And for what the results now show, Brazil lost the gamble.