Olympic athletes at Rio Games will have to pay for air conditioning

The 10,500 athletes at next year’s Olympics will feel first-hand the deep budget cuts buffeting the Rio de Janeiro Games: they won’t have air conditioning in their bedrooms unless someone pays for it.

A new round of testing by The Associated Press shows the city’s Olympic waterways are as rife with pathogens far offshore as they are nearer land, where raw sewage flows into them from fetid rivers and storm drains.

In August, 13 US rowers became ill at a test trial and a team physician suspected the sicknesses were caused by pollution in the Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon, where the event took place, ESPN reported via the AP.

Rio de Janeiro has yet to clean up the polluted waterways for the 2016 Olympics despite promises to do so.

Several athletes were already infected during training this past summer, including a German sailor who required the painful scraping of infection off his legs and hips.

“It’s going to increase the exposure of the people who come into contact with those waters”, Kristina Mena, a USA expert in waterborne viruses, told the AP. “In fact, we have experts engaged on examining the best monitoring protocols and we will be discussing virus testing at an upcoming meeting in Brazil”, the agency told the AP in an emailed statement in late October.

Nevertheless, Olympic and World Health Organization officials have flip-flopped on promises to carry out their own viral testing in the wake of the AP’s July report.

Just nine months before the 2016 Olympics, Rio’s waterways are worse than previously believed. Brazilian officials have officially confirmed that this is not going to happen, placing all of the athletes at risk.

The AP’s first published results were based on samples taken along the shores of the lagoon where rowing and canoeing events will be held.

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Shifting the cost for air conditioning and other amenities from the host city to each nation’s Olympic committee – or to the athletes themselves – is a big deal, said American Nick Symmonds, a two-time Olympic runner.

By comparison, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s maximum illness rate for swimming is 3.6 percent – which many experts say is too high.

So the athletes will be left to compete in waters with viral levels that are “30,000 times higher than what is [considered] highly alarming in the USA or Europe”, no matter how far or near to shore they are, Brooks writes.

“As long as we don’t compromise the games, the quality of the competitions, the experience of the public; we have to look for efficiencies”, Andrada said.