Sail-World.com : Olympic sailors comment on Qingdao Green - Video
Olympic sailors comment on Qingdao Green - Video
'A Laser out training off Qingdao, with patches of weed visible to windward and the weed-trawlers further to windward'
Andrew Campbell
ONE Sport talks to Dan Slater, one of NZ's Qingdao bound sailors, about the problems the algae outbreak on the course could cause for him and the rest of the team at the 2008 Sailing Olympics
To see the video broadcast on ONE Sports News click here and for a second video item click the Youtube.com video below.
AP reports:
China's latest Olympics nightmare is a vast algae bloom that covers one-third of the sea where the world's best sailors are supposed to be competing in just over a month. Athletes call it the blob, the carpet, the fairway, the serious problem.
'We almost think of it as land,' said Carrie Howe, a member of the United States team and her three-person squad's unofficial algae remover. During practice, she dips her hand into the goo three or four times an hour to remove it from the rudder.
When it collects shaggily on the boat's tow rope, she and her teammates refer to it as 'the dog'. They've named it Hickory.
Chinese officials promised at a news conference yesterday that the Olympics competition area, all 50sq km of it, will be clear of the algae before races begin on August 9. Click here to view another video of the cleanup.
'Actually, we don't have a backup,' Qu Chun, the sailing competition manager, said to a small collection of groans from coaches.
The sailing teams had already known Qingdao, a charming port on China's east coast known for its Tsingtao beer, would be a difficult venue. The lower-than-ideal winds. The stronger-than-ideal current. The soupy fog that sometimes keeps teams off the water.
Then came the algae, which one Chinese official at the news conference, Lu Zhenyu, called a 'natural disaster.' First detected in May, it recently swelled to stretches of up to a few kilometres long.
Chinese officials and some experts blamed it on a combination of factors, including warmer seas, winds from the south and an 'exotic' strain of algae from further down the coast.
'In itself, it's not harmful,' said Fei Xiugang, who described himself at the news conference as a seaweed expert. 'It absorbs carbon dioxide. It actually cleans the water.'
But Wang Liqing, a marine biology professor at Shanghai Ocean University, said that the bloom could be caused by pollution, which deposits excessive nutrients in the water and causes algae to grow at abnormal rates. China's east coast is highly industrial.
Whatever the cause of the algae, the sailors - who didn't become Olympians through negative thinking - have tried to describe it in not-so-terrible terms. 'A very new, very large variable,' Howe said.
'Oh my goodness,' said Karyn Gojnich of the Australian team.
'We've watched the Dutch Yngling team, coach boat and three boats in tow get stuck so badly they had to be hooked and hauled out by a local fishing trawler,' US sailor Andrew Campbell wrote in his blog last week.
Some patches of the algae were beginning to stink, some sailors said.
The 30 or so Olympic teams already training at Qingdao are preparing for the possibility that the algae won't be gone before the Games.
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