Skip to main content

Rio de Janeiro is run through with natural inlets, ponds and lagoons. You smell water there before you see it.

At last year's World Cup, we visited a favela called Vila Autodromo that runs alongside the walls of one of the main Olympic facilities. Officials were in the midst of shooing residents away using bribery and implied threat. They don't want visitors getting an up-close view of the squalor many Rio residents live in. Once someone sold up and left, crews rushed in and bulldozed their house to rubble. A week before we'd gotten there, city workers had descended on the main drag and cut down all the trees lining the street.

We were taken on a walking tour through a warren of laneways into what looked like a neighbourhood that had been bombed. We noticed that the bulk of the abandoned and now destroyed homes were hard up on the edge of an enormous pond called Jacarepagua. This was presumably because of the stench.

Though we visited during the mildness of mid-winter, the smell of human waste was overwhelming. One can only imagine what it's like when it gets hot.

Rio neither collects nor treats much of its waste – it's simply run into the closest available body of water. When the city was bidding to host the 2016 Summer Olympics, it promised vast improvements to its sewage system. This was to be the most important infrastructure legacy of the Games.

Once they won the bid and began the ugly work of spending real rather than imaginary money, Brazilian officials rolled back those promises. From the public-relations perspective of an elected official, there are two problems with a modern sewage system: It's expensive, and it can't be photographed for a tourism brochure.

So the water in and around Rio will continue to be a functional outdoor toilet.

There is a small problem for the Olympic events that must take place in open water – rowing, sailing, paddling and swimming. Those athletes will be competing in, getting soaked by and likely swallowing a fair amount of water that, according to analysis, contains tens of thousands of times the level of virus and/or bacteria that would be considered safe.

The Associated Press has been relentlessly chasing this story for months, doing its own testing. In July, it first revealed the scientific extent of a problem anyone with a nose and an ounce of sense already knew – the waters aren't just filthy; they are dangerous.

The story most feared by any flack or corporate spinner is one that can be distilled into a punchy headline.

After the first AP stories ran, there were the usual non-specific promises to fix something that can't be fixed unless you have unlimited money and a time machine.

In August, dozens of rowers and sailors fell ill during warm-up events held in Guanabara Bay, an Olympic venue. It's not clear how many more got sick once they got home. Among the unappetizing effects of a laundry list of viruses found in the water – vomiting, breathing problems and explosive diarrhea. In rare cases, the viruses may cause heart and brain disease.

Rowers and sailors began sheathing themselves in body condoms. They bleached their oars and had people waiting at the dock to hose them down immediately after leaving the water. They took antibiotics preventively. They still got sick.

One expert told the AP that swallowing three teaspoons of Rio water would result in a 99-per-cent likelihood of infection. Have you ever watched Olympic sailing? It can be like standing under a horizontal waterfall. Short of wearing a gas mask, it's impossible not to get some of it in your mouth.

Many assumed the filth was only a serious problem close to shore. All they had to do was move the events farther out to sea (ruining them as spectator sports). The AP crushed that sad dream on Tuesday with a new testing report that shows the waters are just as rancid up to a kilometre offshore.

We're eight months from the start of the Rio Games. Unless someone's planning to drain the Atlantic and fill it back up again with fresh bathwater, there is no solution here.

What will likely happen is that rowers, paddlers and sailors will practise elsewhere, robbing themselves of on-site preparation. They'll first get into the water on the day of competition. They'll ingest a ton of it. Then they'll go back to their homes and spend a few days lying face down on the bathroom floor.

That's a best-case scenario. God help the International Olympic Committee if someone gets really ill out of this.

We've grown used to talking amusedly about the IOC's cynicism and rapaciousness. Its officials have gotten a walk lately because the farcical depths of FIFA's crookedness have made them look reasonably bent by comparison.

But all that's needed to turn this organization from a small joke into a large villain is one very specific story about a single athlete suffering grievous harm because the IOC was either too cowardly, too apathetic or too cheap to hold Brazil to its promises. That headline would capture the global imagination. It could even have the power to tip the IOC's sleazy little boat and knock a bunch of people overboard.

What they'd land in then would also be the sort of stuff you would not want to swallow.

Follow related authors and topics

Authors and topics you follow will be added to your personal news feed in Following.

Interact with The Globe