While in Budapest for the FINA Awards Gala last weekend, FINA Cxecutive Director, Cornel Marculescu took part in an audio interview with ‘Around the Rings’, primarily focusing on Rio 2016.
A myriad of subjects were discussed regarding the 2016 Olympic Games within the 10-minute conversation. Among them, Marculescu says that both the ongoing Rio water quality issues, as well as the recent surge in concern over the Zika virus are both at the forefront of FINA members’ minds with the Games now just 6 months away. The testing of and precautions for both are discussed briefly in the conversation.
When asked about the budget cuts Rio organizers have had to make throughout the past 6 months to prepare for the world’s biggest sporting event, Marculescu states that FINA “has received documents from Rio regarding the reduction in staff, reduction in technology and reduction in volunteers and also reduction in space.”
Marculescu said that FINA will be meeting with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) this week in Lausanne, Switzerland to determine if it will be necessary for FINA staff to go to Rio and actually run the swimming competition properly in the areas in which Rio needs additional support.
Overall, Marculescu says he is “not worried” about the competition in Rio. “Now is not the time to complain,” he says. “Now is the time to do as much as we can in the existing conditions to achieve the best possible event.”
Below is the audio interview in its entirety.
That story about the rowers was made up by Anita DeFrantz who is an the IOC member when she went on Espn radio show. She later recanted her story: http://espn.go.com/olympics/story/_/id/14312537/anita-defrantz-international-olympic-committee-apologizes-blaming-ice-cream-rowers-illnesses
Something bad is going to happen to a lot of open water swimmers. But it’s cool though, it’s totally gonna be fine. Not worried.
Rowers have gotten sick. And they’re, ya know, not even fully in the water.
Steve-O Nolan – there’s value in the conversation to keeping posted on the latest developments (we’ll try and do a full-scale update in the next few days), but the rowers that got sick apparently also swam in the bay, and ate ice cream from a street vendor off the beach. No open water swimmers during the test event have been reported to have gotten sick.
Ooh, I did not know that! Seemed like this was about to be catastrophic if you could get sick from just being in a boat, ha.