Australia’s Olympic team leader is keeping the delegation’s 700 athletes or staff out of the Athletes Village for at least two days, citing electrical and plumbing problems in the sprawling complex less than two weeks before the start of the games in Rio de Janeiro.
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The village will accommodate about 18,000 athletes and staff with a dining room serving 60,000 meals daily. “I have arranged a little present for the mayor as well”, Chiller said. COA president Gerardo Werhein told Argentinian media: “We are hiring apartments outside the village”. I should stress this is a decision made for our athletes in our building.
“It was nothing ever against the Brazilian people”, Tancred said.
“We all know the difficulty of getting accommodation at this time”. We’ve got lighting problems in some of the stairwells.
Australians declined to enter their rooms on Sunday after flushed toilets and open taps caused water to gush down walls and ceilings in the building.
Chiller listed the same problems, and added more. “We have been living in nearby hotels because the village is simply not safe or ready”. It received three of its floors in the athletes accommodation on Monday, and it expects to receive the rest of the 15 floors by Wednesday, Chiller said.
“They should complete the impeccable handover of the Village by the end of the week, probably by Thursday”, he said. “They’ve been working very hard, they’re very skilled and we’re very, very happy with the progress, so looking like according to our plan, we will be able to move everybody on Wednesday”, she said.
She described other amenities in the village as among the best. “It looks spectacular. There are just teething issues in some of the service inside the building”.
The U.S. Olympic Committee acknowledged there were small problems.
“There are a lot of Australians walking around the village with big smiles on their faces, primarily because we have athletes with us, but also because there has been an enormous amount of progress in the last 24 hours”.
Another boxer, the USA’s reigning Olympic and world middleweight champion Claressa Shields, wrote on her Facebook page: “I’m here to tell you, me and the Team USA boxing team have been here 5 days with 0 problems!”, adding that “Rio is a attractive place!”
“Rio said it will finish this, but we can’t take any risk”.
“This is an incredible village, more lovely and better than Sydney”, he said, referring to the 2000 Olympics in Australia.
The village contains tennis courts, soccer fields, seven swimming pools with mountains and the sea as a backdrop. Around 28 percent of Olympic tickets have yet to be sold.
As many as 500,000 visitors are expected to travel to Brazil for the Games, many of them from the United States.
New Zealand’s team said Monday that it was “disappointed the Village wasn’t as ready as it might have been”, but that its advance party had overcome the problems.
“Our team has had to get stuck in to get the job done”, Waddell said. “We’ll work out who pays the bill later on”, she added.
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“Few finishing touches still to be made but when you arrive at 5am on opening day, you can’t expect it to be flawless”.
