“Problems include blocked toilets, leaking pipes, exposed wiring, darkened stairwells where no lighting has been installed and dirty floors in need of a massive clean”, the head of the Australian team, Kitty Chiller, said in a statement.
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As Team USA goes for gold in in Rio de Janeiro, NBC10 will be following the biggest moments from the Olympic Games and from our more than 60 Philadelphia-area athletes thanks to our team in Brazil.
The ribbon cutting ceremony for Rio’s brand new Olympic Village was supposed to be a grand welcoming to athletes from more than 200 countries.
The International Olympic Committee and the organizing committee responded to the bubbling discontent with a statement promising to house athletes with unfinished rooms in “the best available” accommodation in other buildings.
Forget about their toilets flushing the opposite way, the Australian contingent can’t flush at all at the Rio Olympic Village.
New Zealand and Italy’s delegations both said they had been forced to fix problems with electricity and plumbing, while Argentina said on Monday it had reserved accommodation outside the Village for part of its delegation.
“Based on that I would expect it to be far lower than the numbers we present”, he said.
Already strapped for cash, Rio 2016 organizers are now on the hook for last-minute repairs to the athlete village, which at least one arriving delegation has called “unlivable”.
The Australian Olympic Committee deemed the Village “uninhabitable in the short term due to significant plumbing and electrical concerns” on Monday.
“For over a week now, AOC staff have been working long hours to get our section of the village ready for our athletes”, Chiller said at the weekend.
“Think of it this way: if three people return from Rio to LA with exactly 4 days left of circulating virus in their bodies, they’d contribute 12 person-days of viremia”, Gonsavles said.
She claimed that water has come through the ceiling, resulting in large puddles on the floor around cabling and wiring. “It’s looking like, according to our plan, we will be able to move everybody in on Wednesday”.
“Yes, Zika is a serious disease, but transmission linked to the Olympics and ParaOlympic Games is not a substantial public health threat and policy should be guided by this fact”, said Gregg Gonsalves, co-director of the Yale Global Health Justice Partnership and an author on the paper.
“We want them to feel at home here”, Eduardo Paes said.
Paes sarcastically said he was tempted to put “a kangaroo jumping outside” the Australians’ building to make them happy. This is not the first time the Australian delegation has been outspoken against Rio authorities in the past two years, having spoken out about security concerns and the potential risks of the zika outbreak in the past.
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“They’re no more likely to get the virus than anybody else, but the consequences of them getting the virus are much worse than for anybody else”, Higgs said.
