In early 2014, a senior Olympic Committee official returned from a trip to Rio de Janeiro and declared Brazil's preparations for the Summer Games to be the worst he'd ever seen. In the two years since, a crippling recession set in, dozens of construction executives were ensnared in a nationwide corruption scandal and the president has been pushed to the brink of impeachment.

And the preparations?

They're basically fine now, actually. In what is emerging as a rare bright spot in a country buffeted by crisis on all sides, the organizing committee is saying that more than 95 percent of the venues are complete some four months ahead of the opening ceremony and, what's more, data shows spending has largely remained under control.

An aerial of the athlete's village and park in Rio de Janeiro in 2014.

Photographer: Dado Galdieri/Bloomberg

Hand-wringing over the status of construction projects, of course, has been part of just about every Olympic Games played in recent memory -- especially those held in developing countries. But if there was ever a time that angst seemed justified, it was Rio 2016. Even the city's mayor, Eduardo Paes, acknowledged that after the corruption probe began, there was a steady stream of skeptics telling him that the construction work would get derailed. "It didn't," he said in a recent interview. "And I can guarantee you it won't."

That's not to say that the Games are free of problems. Some of the projects, such as a behind-schedule track for the new velodrome, remain a concern; the outbreak of the Zika virus is testing health-care infrastructure; and Brazilians are for the most part disinterested in the games as of right now. Only about half of the tickets have been sold, a percentage so low that no secondary market has yet to develop. (Resale is technically illegal in Brazil, but there's been no need for such a marketplace anyway given how many seats remain unsold.)

Back in 2014, though, ticket sales were the least of Rio's problems. That April -- just a few months before Brazil would successfully host the World Cup -- an International Olympic Committee vice president named John Coates told a forum in Sydney that the construction delays in Rio had become "critical." Not even Athens, a city that famously had finished venues on the eve of the 2004 Games, was as bad as this, Coates had said.