Garbage washed up on the beach at Guanabara Bay in Rio De Janeiro in 2014.Ana Carolina Fernandes/The New York Times
Olympic events, as a general rule, should not be held in water contaminated with untreated raw sewage. But at the highest levels of international sport, you're forced to work with what the deal-makers make available. In the nobody's-perfect world of Olympic venues, Rio de Janeiro 2016 doesn't look all that horrible.
Compared with the human-rights abuses of Beijing, the catastrophic overspending of Athens and the corrupt vanity project that was Vladimir Putin's Sochi, what long-term harm can a few toxic waterways inflict?
A bout of flesh-eating disease, some respiratory distress, explosive diarrhea, uncontrollable vomiting – the usual, run-of-the-mill complaints you expect when you choose to row, canoe, sail or swim in what is essentially an open-air toilet bowl.
It's not as if you can blame Rio 2016's organizers. Sure, they promised to clean up their water the way Beijing pretended to improve human rights. But it's not so easy when you're simultaneously dumping hundreds of millions of litres of raw sewage into Guanabara Bay every day.
Rather than whine, boycott or point flesh-eaten fingers, Olympic athletes should take advantage of the innovative challenges Rio has to offer. In a world hungry for more extreme sports – with gross-out qualities that definitely appeal to the coveted young-male demographic – it's time to one-up namby-pamby beer-milers and make hydrating triathletes gulp nothing but Rio 2016 sewage-infested water. The inevitable bathroom breaks will add to the difficulty level as drained competitors give their all, and then some, against a ticking clock and a shortage of toilet paper.
Canoeists will test their real-world skills by slaloming around dead horses and floating feces on a gritty inner-city river course. Instead of trying to dodge all the noxious flotsam, marathon swimmers get to add a scavenger hunt to their competition, with points for the quantity and quality of items collected.
Post-race blood tests for sailors will reward survivors with the highest level of pathogens. And inspired by the Christ the Redeemer statue overlooking the city's polluted favelas, organizers can showcase a walking-on-water race that will turn Rio's filth into an Olympic miracle.