So climbing will be adopted by the Olympic family in 2020, after joining skateboarding, surfing, karate, men’s baseball and women’s softball on a list of new or returning disciplines officially sanctioned by the International Olympic Committee last week. In its pitch for acceptance the International Federation of Sport Climbing described it as “the only basic human movement not yet included in the Olympic Games”, a suggestion that sounds plausible enough – unless you read it on the toilet.
There is an argument that the one still-ignored basic human movement already has its place at the Olympics, albeit only unofficially. Over the past few weeks it has seemed that the focus of attention as the world’s press gathered in Rio was less on the sport than the sewage, a great deal of which is bobbing grimly around Guanabara Bay. “A giant pipe churns human waste into the marina,” reported USA Today on a visit to the sailing venue. “The stench makes uninitiated visitors feel like vomiting or fainting.” These days, Olympic glory can transform an athlete’s life, opening doors and boosting bank accounts. In Rio the sailors will have to cross streams of effluence to sustain their dreams of affluence.
But there is nothing new here: every four years we get our knickers in a twist about the same subject. The Olympics has become sport’s quadrennial call to ordure, and few modern Games have passed without at least flirting with filth.
In the run-up to 2012 the Times reported that waterways around London’s Stratford site (the Olympic stadium stands less than a mile from the Abbey Mills Pumping Station, the celebrated “Cathedral of Sewage” designed by Joseph Bazalgette) “look and smell more like a shanty town’s open sewer than the promised 21st-century eco-park”. Organisers proposed a lengthy tunnel to take foul fluids elsewhere, the only problem with that idea being that it would have taken £2bn and 15 years to construct. Instead a new pumping station was built, and rapidly recycled refuse was repurposed to flush the park’s toilets and water its gardens.
Four years earlier Beijing had renovated nearly 400 miles of sewage pipes to avoid embarrassment. In 2000 a 20km tunnel was built to carry overflows away from the hitherto filthsome Sydney Harbour, and organisers also had to battle a “sewage-like” whiff that drifted over the main stadium during a test event, eventually traced to a nearby mangrove swamp that emitted a “naturally occurring odour” of nauseating intensity.
In Atlanta 20 years ago the local government issued bonds to finance the repair of a creaking, antiquated sewage system and still didn’t do it on time, leading to scare stories about infected tap water. Four years earlier Barcelona built a new sewage plant just in time to clean up its beach, scientists the previous year having found “large amounts of flotsam, including condoms” and “solid faecal matter” in the area to be used for the Olympic sailing.
Before 1988 Seoul built a 180-mile sewage pipeline to transport waste away from what the Times described as “the dead and stinking Han River”, which flowed past the stadium. In 1980 Tallinn got its very first water purification plant as it prepared to host the Olympic regatta while local factories, which continued to belch their sewage straight into Tallinn Bay, were forced to shut down for a few months before everyone turned up.
In 1973 it was estimated that Montreal was dumping 300 million gallons of raw sewage into the Saint Lawrence river every day. “I don’t know,” said their mayor, Jean Drapeau, when asked to confirm the figure. “I can’t stand there and count them.” When the Olympics arrived three years later the Saint Lawrence, which hosted the rowing and canoeing, was so murky that, according to documents released in 2009, the East German delegation managed to dispose of “about 10 suitcases of medical packaging, needles etc” in it without anyone noticing (These weren’t the only items packed with performance-enhancing drugs the East Germans successfully released into Olympic-related waters, as their 19 medals in the pool that year attest). Last November Montreal dumped 2bn gallons of raw sewage into the Saint Lawrence and let it float its way downstream, proving either that matters have not improved much, or that someone profoundly misunderstands the rules of Poohsticks.
In 1971 it was reported that “for hundreds of years the city of Kiel, Germany, has not done anything to purify its sewage, which flows into the Baltic Sea as raw waste” – but then it hosted the sailing events the following summer, so finally got some purification plants (contestants at the 1936 Berlin Games, which also held its regatta there, were not so lucky). In 1964 an emergency sewage diversion project left Tokyo fresh-fragranced but the city’s “estuaries, many of them already polluted with industrial waste raw sewage, increasingly became putrid cesspools”, according to the Japan Times. In four years’ time they will get another go.
Clearly it takes the arrival of the world’s media for a coastal city to decide that letting its grime and garbage flood into the oceans isn’t in its long-term interests, which is something of a shame, and even then it often can’t get round to really dealing with it, which is a genuine tragedy. Still, it is puzzling that the world has reacted to Rio’s pollution as if it is the first we have ever seen, when we’ve read similar stories every four years for more than half a century, and when Britons would still be wading in whiffy waters had the European Union not forced us to do something about our own putrid problems in the 1970s, and even so 62m tonnes of raw sewage – nearly 25,000 Olympic swimming pools full – was swept into the Thames in 2014, up from 55m in 2013 and with further increases expected. On this issue, kind of like a handful of groundbreaking athletes in 2020, we still have a mountain to climb.
