Rio’s Olympic rowing lagoon may be filled with poop, but you can’t beat the view

Three things to know about Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, where aquatic events like rowing are being held at the 2016 Rio Olympics:

Beltrame is perhaps the best rower in Brazilian history. She competed in the 2004 and 2008 Olympics in the women’s single sculls, and the 2012 Olympics in the women’s lightweight double. She won a gold medal at the 2011 world championships in the lightweight single. Beltrame says she has rowed on Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas every day for the last 11 years and never once taken any extra precautions against the water.

“It never happened, anything, with me,” Beltrame says. “Some people say because I row here every day I have -- I don’t know how I can say it -- I don’t get sick because I get used to it. But I don’t know.”

Before the Olympics began, the quality of the water was one of the biggest stories illustrating Rio’s struggles to get ready to host the Olympics. The volume of the negative news bothered members of Team USA’s rowing team. Megan Kalmoe, three seat in the United States’ women’s quadruples sculls, wrote a blog post proclaiming she would “row through shit for you, America” in response to media coverage she felt focused too much on the water and not enough on the athletes.

Rummel understands the sentiment, but also sees an upside for a sport that gets so little attention, ever.

“At least somebody’s talking about rowing,” he laughs. “I don’t think anyone’s doing it for the coverage. It feels good to do it, and it feels good that people are talking about us. In the end we go to Worlds every year, and we work just as hard going to Worlds and we’re going to work just as hard to win every race we enter in, and there’s no headlines there.”

Beltrame rows for Club de Regatas Vasco da Gama, one of Rio’s biggest sports clubs that has rowing facilities on the lagoon. All told, FISA, the world rowing federation, counts 10 rowing clubs with members who row on the lagoon every day, “and I don’t know anyone who got sick because of the water,” Beltrame says. No bad smell, and no gruesome debris, either. The fish kills that have been reported on are rare according to Beltrame, occurring maybe three or four times ever for as long as she has been in Rio.

“It really seems just like any other race course,” Rummel says. “You really wouldn’t know unless there were all these stories about it. And I mean, I think some of those stories may have been overblown, I think there was some issue with it, maybe they cleaned it up more since then. ... All I know is that it’s definitely not something that we’re coming here and just saying, ‘Oh my god, the stories are all true.’”

Team USA is taking precautions. The athletes are putting their water bottles in plastic bags when they take them on the water, and being diligent about washing down oar handles, washing their hands and trying not to touch their faces too often. They are wearing antimicrobial unisuits, but not to protect against the pollution, as was reported in the lead up to Rio.

“All it was was just a fabric that is not supposed to get bacteria and smell up like most things do,” Rummel says. “It wasn’t like something that was going to ward off bacteria and keep us healthy.”

Beltrame isn’t in denial about the water’s problems. She has rowed all around the world and knows there are much cleaner courses. Lac d’Aiguebelette in France where the 2015 world championships were held, for example, was so clean that others could drink from it, she says. She certainly wouldn’t recommend even swimming in Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, though she has gone in when her boat has flipped by accident.

“That has happened three times,” Beltrame says. “I was pregnant when I fell into the water, and nothing happened to me or my baby, so I think it’s okay [laughs]. Some people practice [water skiing]. They fall in the water all the time.”

None of this is to say that anecdotes trump science, but for what it’s worth Rummel hasn’t seen nor smelled any of the frightening things supposedly laying in water, either, and there haven’t been any reports so far of athletes getting sick after coming in contact with the Lagoon.

Which also doesn’t forgive Rio’s government for promising to clean up Guanabara Bay and Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas before the start of the games and failing to do so. Environmentalism was a big theme of the opening ceremonies, and was supposed to be a theme of the entire games and hasn’t actually been in reality. But the environment, the part of it that can be controlled by humans, has yet to affect the games at a competition level, at least. With that in mind, Beltrame admits that the negative attention on the water bothers her.

“We have to talk about the reality,” she says. “There is many kinds of problems here, violence and other stuff, but we have to point to things that are real, and not make up something to cause -- I don’t know -- fear in the athlete, you know? And I know that the athletes arrived here and love the place.”

Rummel isn’t particularly riled up about anything in his Rio experience. His wife gave birth to their first child, a son named Oliver, just six days before he had leave, so his family has been in his thoughts along with the upcoming opportunity to improve on the bronze medal he won in London. In fact, he suggests, “if you want a story that I don’t think is being reported enough, I think it’d be really cool to take a look at the spouses and the family members and stuff like that, what sacrifices they’re making for us to go.”

As is, the media coverage in Rio isn’t causing him much consternation. Maybe he’s tired of hearing about the water, but he doesn’t feel like anyone is twisting his dreams. At the Olympics, every possible storyline gets its due, he says. Whatever gets reported, his job remains staggeringly simple: Get his oar in the water and go fast.

“We’re doing it because we love racing and we love winning,” Rummel says. “And we really want to win in this big race.”

When the wind clears, that is.