Rio's final 2009 bid book included a seven-year commitment to tackling an environmental disaster that took decades to create. The widespread absence of modern sanitation was spun into an asset by the leaders of Rio's campaign. The direct, flattering appeal to the International Olympic Committee was this: Bestow the transformative power of your three-week event on our city. We need the Games more than Chicago does, more than Madrid.
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The same bid document asserted that the Brazilian economy was stable and called funding for Rio 2016 "secure." Six months shy of the opening ceremony, however, recession reigns, inflation rages in double digits and the Games budget has taken a significant hit. Brazil's public health system, already reeling, now must cope with the burgeoning Zika virus epidemic.
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Profound and intractable as the city's sanitation problems are, the precise risks to Olympic athletes competing on any given day this summer are hard to calculate. Some got sick at sporting test events last year, but none of these cases has been publicly, definitively connected to the water, as opposed to food or another source.
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Few athletes of any nationality care to dwell on the subject. They're trained to play the schedule and focus on what they can control. There are exceptions, such as Martine Grael, who says she has hauled discarded television sets out of the water during training sessions, and Dutch windsurfer Dorian van Rijsselberghe, the defending Olympic champion. An ambassador for the Netherlands-based nonprofit Plastic Soup Foundation, van Rijsselberghe called the conditions in Rio "disgustingly filthy and dangerous" in a blog written after he won the Copa Brasil de Vela event in Guanabara Bay in December:
"A member of our coaching staff almost puked while entering the Olympic harbor," van Rijsselberghe wrote in text translated and posted on the foundation's website.
"Raw sewage. The athletes do not talk about it. ... They are not there to challenge the world's environmental issues. But the athletes are all concerned and deeply worried.
"I am happy I won last week. Maybe I won because I had the least amount of debris on my fin."
