Olympics: Out with the green water, in with the blue

Mario Andrada, a spokesman for the Rio Games, said that to ensure that the competition could go ahead, officials would drain the water from the pool – almost 1 million gallons of it – and replace it with clean water from a nearby practice pool.

Nascimento had said organizers would not drain the water in the diving pool but would instead try to improve the pool’s filters.

Officials said that a contractor mistakenly added 80 litres of hydrogen peroxide to the diving and water polo pools on August 5.

Olympic organizers will take “extreme measures” by draining one of the pools that turned green and refilling it by Sunday morning, just a few hours before the start of the synchronized swimming events, an official said.

He stressed again that the kale-colored water posed no risk to the health of the athletes. Still, visibility underwater is a major issue in synchronized swimming, where competitors spend lots of time underwater and need to be able to see their teammates.

“We are going to grab the water from the warm-up pool, drain the water out of the competition pool and insert the water from the warm-up pool into the competition pool”. Due to the absence of chlorine the water appears to have become a breeding ground for alga, turning the colour of the water emerald green.

USOC spokesman Patrick Sandusky says Lochte and the others left the French Olympic team’s hospitality house early Sunday in a taxi headed for the athletes village, hours after the last night of Olympic swimming. The IOC has acknowledged that the Rio Olympics are missing part of the so-called “look” that characterizes the games.

Gustavo Nascimento, the director of venue management of Rio 2016 Olympic said that this is a way of cleaning swimming pools but you’re not supposed to combine it with chlorine.

We say “mostly” because there has been one notable weird sports-related issue: pools at the Olympics are randomly turning green. We could have done better in fixing it quickly.

The problem was solved by emptying the offending pool and replacing the water with clean water from a practice pool. “We learned a painful lesson the hard way”, Andrada said.