Australian contingent boycotts ‘unfinished’ Athletes Village

Kitty Chiller, the head of the Australian delegation, said in a statement on Sunday that team members "will not move into our allocated building" until serious plumbing, electrical and cleaning problems are fixed.

Published : Jul 24, 2016 21:48 IST , Rio de Janeiro

The sprawling 31-building Athletes village, which will house 18,000 athletes and officials at the height of the games, opened officially on Sunday.
The sprawling 31-building Athletes village, which will house 18,000 athletes and officials at the height of the games, opened officially on Sunday.
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The sprawling 31-building Athletes village, which will house 18,000 athletes and officials at the height of the games, opened officially on Sunday.

Australian athletes will not move into their rooms at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics until serious plumbing, electrical and cleaning problems are fixed, with the troubled South American games opening in under two weeks.

Kitty Chiller, the head of the Australian delegation, said in a statement on Sunday that team members “will not move into our allocated building” at the Athletes Village. She gave no hint of when they might.

This comes as the sprawling 31-building village, which will house 18,000 athletes and officials at the height of the games, opened officially on Sunday with some athletes expected to arrive. This is the latest problem for the troubled games, which have been hit by the Zika virus, water pollution and severe budget cuts.

The International Olympic Committee and local organizers held emergency talks on Sunday, but did not reply immediately to emails.

“We’re having plumbing problems, we’ve got leaking pipes,” Mike Tancred, the spokesman for the Australian team, said in an interview with AP . “We’ve got electrical problems. We got cleaning problems. We’ve got lighting problems in some of the stairwells.”

“We did a stress test on Saturday, turned on the taps and flushed the toilets, and water came flooding down the walls,” Tancred said.

Chiller listed the same problems, and added more. “Water came down walls, there was a strong smell of gas in some apartments and there was ‘shorting’ in the electrical wiring,” she said. “We have been living in nearby hotels because the village is simply not safe or ready.”

She said teams from Britain and New Zealand had similar problems, which have been going on for at least a week.

Chiller said the IOC will ask local organizers to do stress tests “throughout the Olympic Village,” a process that could force major delays and require people living there now to leave.

The 31-building compound contains tennis courts, soccer fields, seven swimming pools with mountains and the sea as a backdrop topped off by a massive dining-kitchen compound that’s as large as three football fields.

The 3,600 apartments are to be sold after the Olympics with some prices reaching $700,000. The development cost about $1.5 billion, built by the Brazilian billionaire Carlos Carvalho.

“From the exterior it looks like the Hilton Hotel,” Tancred said. “But inside it’s not finished.”

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