Athletes who participate in water sports will carry an infection risk of 99 percent.
It is a cheap and easy
metaphor, made no more sophisticated or amusing by the fact that it is
true. The Rio 2016 Olympics are caked in all kinds of shit. There’s the
bullshit of broken promises about the benefits that the Games would
bring, and then there is the actual literal shit, long a reality in Rio
and now visible to the world. The rivers, streams, and oceans are filled
with floating feces, as the raw sewage of the city is, per custom,
pumped directly into the water. Even the most pristine appearing of
beaches are, in the words of an Associated Press report, “thick with putrid sludge.” And its Olympic lake, Rodrigo de Freitas, is “littered with rotting fish.”
This is an Olympic sized problem, as athletes who
participate in water sports will carry, in the words of Kristina Mena,
an expert in waterborne viruses, “an infection risk of 99 percent.” As
of this writing not one of the many water venues has been deemed safe
for swimming or boating with waterborne virus levels in the water
amounting to 1.7 million times the level of what would be dangerous in
Southern California. John Griffith, a marine biologist at the Southern
California Coastal Water Research Project said to the AP.
“It’s all the water from the toilets and the showers and whatever
people put down their sinks, all mixed up, and it’s going out into the
beach waters. Those kinds of things would be shut down immediately if
found here.”
Austrian sailors who practiced briefly in the Rio waters
left the experience with violent vomiting, fevers, diarrhea and IVs in
their arms. And these are the sailors. Imagine those who compete in what
is called “The Olympic Marathon,” a 10 kilometer race that means two
hours in this water for competitors.
Emily White, co-founder of Dreamfuel and manager of many
elite swimmers said to me, “There have been countless examples of
terrible water conditions for our open water athletes over the past
decade, however the water analyses coming out of Rio are truly
horrifying. Yes, not every sport at the Olympics is on or in water, but
clearly the choice in location of the open water races in Rio did not
take the athletes’ health or safety into consideration.
Athletes are the
reason the events exist in the first place—they need to be the absolute priority in all decisions made surrounding the races they compete in.”
This horror story also, if nothing else, sheds light on
what has been a consistent problem in Rio for decades, and one that has
only worsened as the city has become increasingly wealthy and
increasingly unequal. As Juliana Barbassa, longtime Rio journalist and
author of the new book Dancing with the Devil in the City of God: Rio de Janeiro on the Brink said to me, “Rio’s foul waters are a symptom of larger government inability to meet people’s basic needs.”
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