US Olympic sailing team managing director Josh Adams expressed slightly mixed feelings about sailing in polluted Guanabara Bay, the venue for sailing in the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro and the site of the city’s first test event, which started on Sunday.
Adams likes that Guanabara is located in the heart of Rio and is a familiar venue to world sailors. It means sailors will be in the host city and not lodged on a coast hours away from the action.
On the other hand, US sailing officials have hired medical experts to test the water in Guanabara, which has suffered from decades of untreated human waste being poured into the bay.
Photo: AFP
Adams on Sunday said tests showed the water to be “contaminated,” prompting what he termed “preventive measures.”
Despite problems, Adams was upbeat about the venue and said his sailors were too.
“We feel our sailors are safe, and we’re aware of the issues with the water quality in Guanabara Bay,” Adams said. “We know and have proven with our own water testing project that the water is contaminated, but we didn’t discover anything that people didn’t already know. It’s contaminated largely because of unregulated sewage.”
Teams in the test event have been invited by Olympics organizers to test the water.
Adams said US tests showed “nothing really alarming,” although he declined to reveal the results or the “preventive measures” that scientists had suggested.
“We’d rather not share any more information than that,” he said.
Health experts haves suggested that sailors be vaccinated for hepatitis A, and at a small regatta last year, sailors rubbed alcohol on their hands after leaving the water.
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