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Rio’s filthy water is already making pro athletes sick. Just ask the surfers.

May 19, 2016 · 2:45 PM EDT
By Will Carless
Barra da Tijuca beach a stinking mess on May 4 — and this was long after cleanup began.


Rio de Janeiro’s main Olympic neighborhood stinks. Literally.

For the last few weeks, residents of Barra da Tijuca, home to the main Olympic park and Olympic village, have woken to the fetid smell of filthy water.

Local biologist Mario Moscatelli blames the latest stink-fest on a couple of huge swells that battered Rio last month. They sent waves into the city’s inland lagoons, where they churned up the seabed and released noxious gases and filth — including layers of human waste — from underwater.

“Excuse my frankness, but the rivers feeding into the lagoons are pure sh--,” Moscatelli wrote in an email, “the feces of thousands of people emptied into the river without treatment.”

The swells, along with peak high tides, also helped rupture an “eco-barrier” — a temporary floating device that traps garbage flowing from inland into one of Barra da Tijuca’s main lagoons. The result: Piles of trash flowed out of the mouth of the lagoon onto one of Rio’s most iconic and most visited beaches a couple of months before the Summer Olympics.

This charming scene happened to coincide with the arrival of the Oi Rio Pro, a top-tier surfing competition and the pride of Brazil’s thriving surf culture. In the days leading to the tournament, dozens of municipal workers scrambled to clean the beach before the world’s top surfers, and thousands of fans, showed up.

But they couldn’t do anything about the slick of brown, smelly water flowing toward the contest site. The organizers moved the first days of the event to Grumari, an idyllic beach about 45 minutes away.

It’s just the latest foul water story to trickle out of this megacity. Last year, scientists said waterways including Guanabara Bay — an Olympic venue — were so filthy they were not safe for human contact. Even the fish hardly want to swim there.

Moscatelli blames the city and state governments of Rio for their abject failure to provide decent sewage treatment facilities and trash collection in local waterways. The city responded to our questions by blaming the state government. The state didn’t respond to calls for comment.

But we did reach Adrian “Ace” Buchan. He’s one of the world’s top surfers and is currently 10th on the official World Surf League rankings. Buchan is the league’s appointed “surfer’s representative.” An edited, condensed version of the interview follows.

Will Carless: You’ve surfed in Rio before. Have you ever gotten sick from it?

Ace Buchan: Yes, I got sick last year and the doctor at the event told me he believed it was from exposure to the water. I was really dizzy and nauseous the day I had to surf and nearly pulled out. A few months later in Tahiti, I was still having problems with my stomach and had to go on antibiotics.

I got sick again this year and the doctor was unsure whether it was food poisoning or the water.

Rio’s filthy water is already making pro athletes sick. Just ask the surfers. | Public Radio International