Terrible water quality continues to cause stink
Canadian athletes say they’ll deal with it when time comes
On her marathon swims across lakes and channels, Vicki Keith faced jellyfish, sharks and hallucinations brought on by days of swimming without rest.
Yet none of that stopped her. What did was human sewage in Lake Ontario.
“I was projectile vomiting and it became very obvious that I shouldn’t continue,” Keith says, recalling her aborted swim in 1990.
When she finally agreed to give up on her attempt to cross Lake Ontario three times — she had the record for doing it twice — her crew couldn’t pull her from the water.
“It took my crew members three tries to grab my arms and pull me out because I was so slimy they couldn’t grip me,” she recalled.
It wasn’t something she was prepared for — no one had told her about the “toilet bowl current” the way they had warned her about the sharks in the Catalina Channel — but she handled it the way someone who can swim for 60 hours straight handles a lot of things.
“I tried not to think about it because, if I had, I would have been even more disgusted. I have an incredible ability to block things out of my brain. It’s one of the reasons I was a marathon swimmer,” says Keith, now coach of the Y Penguins Aquatic Club in Kingston.
So even as she swam through pulpy, stinking sewage she could smell and taste, she put it out of her mind alongside all the pain and thoughts of quitting that can beset ultra-endurance athletes.
“I had never heard about the toilet bowl current and, if I had, I probably would have done my best to avoid it.”
While Keith didn’t know about Lake Ontario’s pollution problem — in heavy rainfall untreated or partially treated sewage can flow into the lake — until she was in the middle of it, Canada’s Olympic-bound athletes have been hearing plenty of troubling reports about Rio with eight months to go.
The water in Brazil, whether it’s in Olympic sailing, rowing, paddling and open-water swimming venues or the stuff that comes out of the taps in homes and hotels, isn’t good.
Cleaning it up was part of the nation’s bid for the 2016 Olympics but, like many best laid plans, much of what was promised has yet to happen.
As the Associated Press has shown by conducting the first independent and comprehensive testing for viruses and bacteria, the water at Olympic sites may be far worse than people thought.
“I’m horrified to think people are actually going to get in that water if it’s as bad as people say it is,” Keith said. “Sometimes we blow things out of proportion and we get there and say, ‘Oh, this is fine.’ If people have been in the water and are experiencing (high levels of illness), you’ve got one clue.”
No Canadian athletes in any of the water sport test events in Rio reported getting sick from the water.
Some experts have said the water quality is so bad athletes are all but certain to come into contact with disease-causing viruses.
“That’s got everybody a little scared,” Dr. Robert McCormack, medical director for the Canadian Olympic Committee, says.
“If it’s almost certain that you’re going to get infected, how do you hold the Games?”
But, he argues, much of the scariest sounding data is based on viral test- ing, which is not currently the international norm for assessing water quality. Viruses account for only five per cent of water related illnesses, and viral testing doesn’t necessarily uncover live viruses but rather evidence they were once there, he adds.
“It’s a bit like going through the forest and seeing bear scat. It tells you there was a bear there some time . . . it doesn’t tell you there’s a bear there now.”
Most illness comes from bacteria, he says, and that’s why the tests carried out by Brazilian officials and monitored by the IOC are what he’s watching.
“When you look at those counts, the water quality in Rio is not perfect but not nearly as bad as the AP article suggests,” he says.
“It’s not completely safe, but it’s no different than when we take the athletes to Beijing or when they go to Cuba or Mexico. Athletes are used to competing in environments where the water may not be exactly what we’re used to in Canada.”
Canadian athletes are ramping up their precautions — from obsessive hand-washing to antibiotics — but largely they seem to be relying on their own experience to determine how bad things are.
“I was down in Rio in September and we paddled the course and I was down in 2007 for the Pan Am Games and neither time I got sick,” says kayaker Mark de Jonge, the world champion in 200 metres and Olympic bronze medallist.
“I’ll be cautious and take every precaution I can. But, ultimately, unless they decided to move venues, I’m going to be racing there in the biggest race of my life and I would do that whether it was raw sewage or the purest water on earth,” he added.
“It’s not something I can control so I’m putting my faith in the IOC to hopefully clear that situation up, and if that can’t be done, I’ll just have to tough it out.”
Richard Weinberger, who is looking to win another Olympic medal in open-water swimming, doesn’t even blink when asked about the water in Rio.
He’s raced in the Sumidero Canyon in Mexico, where he faced crocodiles — his coach’s advice was to make sure he wasn’t at the back of the pack where crocs tend to hunt — and water so polluted the entire field was violently ill afterward.
Over the years, he’s raced in Brazil and had stomach issues over food, but this August he trained and competed in the Olympic venue off Copacabana beach without incident.
“We did take precautionary steps to avoid illness,” Weinberger says.
His 10-kilometre Olympic race will take around an hour and 50 minutes, and it’s impossible for him not to ingest some water. So what kind of precautions are we talking about?
Amild antibiotic and, after training, “a shot of vodka or can of Coke . . . it kills the bacteria in your stomach,” he says. Vodka or pop? “Yeah, we don’t ever use vodka, though,” he says, laughing.
Having experienced the same kind of daring animal encounters Keith faced in her open water swims and armed with his arsenal of precautions — from pharmaceuticals to home-remedies — the water quality in Rio isn’t much of a concern to him at all.
“It’s the wind-up before the Olympics,” he says, noting there’s always a problem that grabs popular attention.
Canada’s Mark Oldershaw, a veteran paddler, agrees.
“Everywhere in the world has issues, and the Olympics put a magnifying glass on that,” the Olympic bronze medallist said.
“I’m sure it could be a lot cleaner, the water in Rio and probably should be, but every city, every country has its issues. Nowhere is perfect.”
The Rio Summer Olympics begin Aug. 5, 2016.