IOC: ‘No concern over Rio water standards’

Ivan Bulaja who coaches Austria’s 49-er class sailing team has already seen his sailors fall ill during training, saying entering the waters was “a huge risk for the athletes”. “We are doing everything we can and following all the experts’ advice”, Richard Budgett, IOC medical director, said. The AP also reported that during the bid to host the Olympic games Brazil officials had stated they would build four treatment plants to deal with the water contamination issues that the country faces.

After collecting 37 samples, Spilki tested for adenoviruses, enteroviruses, and rotaviruses, which are known to cause vomiting, explosive diarrhea, respiratory problems, and serious brain and heart diseases. Unbelievably, some tests found levels up to 1.7 million times what is acceptable for beaches in the U.S. Almost 1,400 of them will come into contact with waters contaminated by rampant sewage pollution, as they sail in the Guanabara Bay; swim off of Copacabana Beach; and canoe and row on the brackish waters of the Rodrigo de Freitas Lake.

The global Olympic Committee reacted by reiterating that the health and welfare of athletes was its top priority.

The U.S. Olympic Committee has been collecting data regarding the state of pollution in the Rio Olympic outdoor water venues and determining precautionary measures for American athletes. An AP investigation has revealed that athletes in next summer’s Rio Olympics will be swimming and boating in bodies of water so rife with human feces that they’re likely to spend more time battling stomach cramps than time trials.

Rio de Janeiro’s state environmental agency took their most recent pollution reading this past Monday and found an area where the triathletes are training is unsafe for swimming. This week the AP threw on a few rubber gloves and actually tested for viruses, only to discover the shit has really hit the water.

“We have had reassurances from the WHO (World Health Organization) and others that there is no significant risk to athlete health”.

“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”, John Griffith, a marine biologist at the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project, who examined the AP tests, said.

Rio de Janeiro will employ more than twice the number of security personnel for the 2016 Olympics than London used in 2012 but authorities are not planning to occupy the city’s notorious favelas, the games’ organizers said on Thursday. Even an Olympic site assumed to have been cleaned up in the last few years turns out to have the most polluted waters among the Olympic sites.

This would be the largest security plan for the Olympic Games in the history of the city, official sources said. He also tested for rotavirus, the main cause of gastroenteritis globally.

The area that was ruled unfit by the Rio environmental agency for swimming earlier this week was based levels of fecal coliforms, which are single-celled organisms that live in the intestines of humans and animals.