Officials said on Saturday that the pool would be drained and replaced with almost a million gallons of clear water before the start of the synchronized swimming on Sunday, reports Xinhua.
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Andrada said a group of swimmers had risked missing their races after a bus driver meant to have taken them to the Olympic pool misheard the acronym used for the site and drove them instead to the athletics stadium on the other side of town.
Standing next to the clear pool in the Maria Lenk Aquatic Centre the weird colour of the competition pool became apparent and earlier reports claimed it was due to a “proliferation of algae”.
For the most part, the sports side of things at the Rio Olympics have been relatively free of controversy.
Workers completed the Olympic-sized task of draining all 3.725 million liters (more than 984,000 gallons) of the green water at the Maria Lenk Aquatics Center and replacing it with clean water from a nearby practice pool.
Officials had raced to drain green-tinged water out of the pool overnight at a venue that has embarrassed local organisers. Red-faced Rio Olympics organisers anxiously waited for the diving water to turn back from a nervy green to classic blue as a lack of chemicals was revealed as the cause of the colour changes.
“It should be light blue, transparent”. The good news is that the pool now has an excellent forehand. She concluded that they learned painful lessons the hard way.
Nascimento said there are two possibilities of what made the water change color, or maybe a combination of both, adding that the chemicals that created the situation are already gone.
Gustavo Nascimento, the director of venue management of Rio 2016 Olympic said that this is a way of cleaning swimming pools but you’re not supposed to combine it with chlorine.
“It was an 11-hour work and it’s fine, it’s flawless, and good for the competition”.
Luckily for them, divers have been taking it in their stride.
Russian track and field suffered a final humiliation on Saturday when the sport’s governing body suspended long jumper Darya Klishina, removing from competition its only competitor to have survived the athletics blanket ban.
“The electronic monitoring system that measures the amount of chlorine in the water was betrayed by this chemistry”, Nascimento said.
American Abigail Johnston, who finished a disappointing last in Sunday’s final also labelled the pool a “swamp”.
A spokesman for Rio 2016 labelled the ordeal an “embarrassment”, although they refused to confirm who the independent contractor was that was responsible for the dump of hydrogen peroxide.
“Open air and green water it goes with the territory”.
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Officials said they would not drain the diving pool.
