The house's rough-and-ready drinking rooms should also be an entertaining spot to watch these two nations' athletes do their best.

BBC: Cheering on the Olympic underdogs

At the end of a sandy track leading out of town into the surrounding scrubland, in a house made of rough-hewn branches covered in clay, Lucia Vieira looks after her two children while her husband is out earning a mere 5 reais a day as a farm labourer.

ECONOMIST: Three square meals a day

As chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Kennedy has brought the mystique and glitz of America's premier political family to the rough-and-tumble job of financing the party's drive to reclaim a majority in the House of Representatives.

CNN: latimes.com: Talking baseball and politics with George W. Bush