The Olympics may be harmful to your health

Beijing may turn into a complete disaster. The IOC is considering changing the schedule on the fly if air pollution levels would threaten athletes health.

Key graph: "If you have a risk you may have to decide to work on the rescheduling of the competition," said the Games' executive director Gilbert Felli.

Felli confirmed any decisions would be made just prior to or during the Games.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/olympics/7139041.stm

With pollution levels currently at three times above what the U.N. considers a safe limit, how can this turn out any other way than horribly for all concerned.

 

something tells me the Olympic Village will be a ghost town in some ways during the games. Many athletes -- especially those in heavy cardio sports with only one or two days of competition -- will fly in for their specific events only and fly out as soon as they can.

 

They were saying similar things before LA '84. Anyone know how much higher the pollution levels in Beijing are than what LA had? (Maybe it is much, much worse; I don't know.)

 

I'm going to guess somewhere on the far side of "much, much worse."

I seem to recall rush hour virtually disappearing during the '84 Olympics because so many people took vacation.

Plus I don't think LA has anywhere near the industrial pollution Beijing does.

 

Not happening. Adjusting for a 12-hour time difference and the 20-hours that it takes to fly there will not be done in one day. I cannot see someone in a cardio program dealing with that type of jetlag

Having actually been to Beijing, I’ll say that the pollution is pretty bad. It is not to the point where people are going to be flipping out about it, but if someone stays longer than a week, it could be a problem. Most of the training will be done indoors, where air levels for the athletes will be kept fine.

I understand the major concern with health and the impacts of the pollution, but it really shouldn’t be overblown. There will be minimal impact on the events and the fans should have no problems at all.

 

I think Idaho may be saying the athletes will congregate in Japan, or somewhere nearby to work out, and jet in and out from there.

That would certainly make sense for a lot of competitors.

 

Possibly, but I don't see the Chinese government allowing such a thing to happen. Can you imagine the egg on their face if it was widely reported that the competitors were living outside of the country in order to avoid the pollution?

 

I believe there was a 60 Minutes segment on Beijing/China pollution this past Sunday. Apparently makes LA look like Yellowstone Park in comparison.

 

The Chinese government can't stop other countries' athletes from doing that.

 

China's a pretty big country. I'm sure they could train somewhere outside of Beijing and still fly in for their events without even suffering any jet lag.

Not sure if they will, but there's plenty of options available to them if the pollution is that bad.

 

Physically, no, they cannot. However, they can cut out certain incoming flights, change the times of the flights to be inconvenient or re-route the flights so that they would be inconvenient. There is no need to lock people away, but I could see them making life for those that choose to do so very difficult and thus not worth their while.

It is a big country. The problem is that the places without pollution are the places without airports. People aren’t going take the just over an hour flight from Shanghai, which is even worse. Even the locations that are billed as “beautiful” never see the sun.

 

And they'll never be allowed to get away with jacking with flight schedules either. Ain't gonna happen.