Cory E Friedman
02 Sep 2015
ISAF is shocked — shocked— to find that pollution is going on at the Olympic sailing venue in Guanabara Bay!
After all, the politicians at ISAF were assured by the politicians in Rio who have never accomplished a thing for their people that the pollution which has festered for many decades will magically vanish on schedule despite the fact that no one in Rio was actually doing anything.
This in a third world country where everyone is on notice that magical thinking regularly substitutes for the ugly reality – and ISAF believed it!
So ISAF is going to hold its breath until those incompetent, corrupt and ineffectual politicians complete in one year a project so mammoth that it would take a fully mobilized first world country a decade or more to accomplish.
Not only that, but with emerging market investors running for the exits, Brazil will be hard pressed to pay or refinance its outstanding obligations, let alone finance new ones. And if the impossible is not accomplished what then?
Well ISAF is going to take the boats that were chosen for their ability to sail fast on stadium courses close to shore for the benefit of spectators and TV, out into the open ocean to race in conditions with which they cannot cope and where nobody will be able to see them.
All of the sailors‘ years of practice learning Guanabara Bay will be flushed down the toilet and into the bay.
Is there a Plan B to deal with a problem ISAF has been warned about for years? Of course not. Will the ISAF blue blazers suffer as a result of this fiasco? Of course not.
Unfortunately, it is the sailors who have devoted years of their lives to an Olympic dream and the sport that will suffer from this abject incompetence, as will all those sailors who are paying for ISAF’s incompetence.
Will anything really change? What do you think? You couldn’t make this up.