Air Apparent
Olympic athletes already worried about breathing.
Jeff Brooke, The Globe and Mail
Write an email about this article
View the source for this article (may require registration or a fee).
Fair Use
There's a cloud hanging over the future of the 2008 Summer Games as some of the worst air on the planet has athletes already worried about breathing. Beijing Games officials, however, are promising a blue sky, JEFF BROOKE reports
BEIJING -- The triathlon course for the Beijing Olympics is difficult enough. The running segment alone has eight demanding hills to climb.
But it's not just the terrain that makes the course so punishing. It's the air surrounding the athletes.
Beijing has notoriously toxic air, some of the worst on the planet. A thick haze of colourful chemicals perpetually hangs over the Chinese capital, especially in the summer, when the Games will be on.
For triathletes, who gulp massive quantities of oxygen while they swim, cycle and run, the air quality is troubling.
"Beijing is like you have your mouth on the tail end of an exhaust pipe," said Paul Tichelaar, a Canadian triathlete who has competed twice on the Beijing Olympics course.
Other athletes who have visited the city say the same thing. Some describe the air as the worst they've encountered around the world.
The pollution threatens the athletes who will be in Beijing in August of 2008.
Combined with summer temperatures that typically exceed 30 and humidity in the 80-per-cent range, it's another obstacle they'll face as they try to turn in their best performances on sport's biggest stage.
It's also a significant challenge to the group that's organizing the Olympics. These are historic Games -- the first in China -- and the details-oriented organizers are determined to display their country to the world in the brightest possible light.
They're hard at work even now, 622 days ahead of the opening ceremony, looking for solutions.
They say they will do their best to curtail, and even eliminate, the dirty air by shutting down or moving factories, switching to more environmentally friendly power and limiting automobile use. It's not an empty promise.
They did it before with some success -- at the Asian Games in 1990, for example.
Sun Weijia of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad, informally known as BOCOG, acknowledged the city's poor air quality, but said it will be taken care of.
"We just move it," he answered when asked recently about the belching factories in the city and area.
Last week, BOCOG said Beijing is drafting a plan to "guarantee" better air.
"More rigorous measures will be put in force to control pollution during the Olympics," said Wang Wei, the executive vice-president and secretary-general of BOCOG.
Even many Western observers are convinced that athletes will compete under blue skies.
"If they want to get something done, they can," said Jon Kolb, a Calgary researcher who has collected environmental data in Beijing.
Many athletes are optimistic, too, although they can't forget what they've experienced first-hand.
"It is just inescapable," Tichelaar said of the pollution after returning home from a World Cup race on the Beijing course in September. "It just kind of worries you. What am I breathing in?"
The Edmonton triathlete, a seven-year veteran who represented Canada at the Commonwealth Games in Australia this year, also competed on the Olympics course in 2005. But that year a breeze blew in from the north, flushing much of the pollution from the city and the race course.
He came home raving about the demanding but scenic course, which is near a mountain range and the historic Ming Tombs and passes through tree-lined streets north of the city. He finished 21st.
But this year was a different story. The wind was out of the south and the city was blanketed in smog.
"You couldn't see anything," Tichelaar said. "It was sad. . . . I've never seen anything like that in the world."
Tichelaar did not finish this year because his bicycle blew a tire midway through the race. But he considers it almost a blessing that he didn't have to run. "Everyone who had to run wasn't looking too good after," he said.
Many athletes at the world junior track and field championships in August had troubles, too. In sweltering heat and dense pollution, athletes suffered.
Mathieu Gentes of Athletics Canada said many of the 28 Canadians at the championships endured heat-related problems, breathing difficulties or both.
"Were they able to perform at their top level?" Gentes said. "No, they weren't."
Athletes in aerobically less demanding sports have taken notice of Beijing's air, too.
Alison Bradley, an outfielder on Canada's national softball team, said she was floored by the smog when the team competed in the world championship in Beijing in late August and early September.
"You keep thinking that it is the fog and that it's going to lift, but it really doesn't," said Bradley, of Pinkerton, Ont.
She competed in the Athens Olympics in 2004, and has been with the national team in such places as South America, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. In the summer, the team competed in exhibition games in Texas and Oklahoma during a heat wave. Temperatures pushed 40.
Asked how Beijing compares, Bradley said: "Oh, Beijing was definitely worse. . . . It's the worst polluted city that I've been to. Without a doubt, it wins hands down. It's not something you want to be winning, but . . ."
Teammate Erin Cumpstone, a catcher from Saskatoon, said she didn't notice the pollution too much while at Fengtai field because she was focused on the games. But the air quality hit her when she looked out her hotel window.
"You couldn't see the building beside you," she said.
Even landing at Beijing's international airport is revealing. On many summer days, travellers can't see the city from above because it is shrouded. By the time a landing plane cuts through the smog, it is not far above the runway.
The evidence of a pollution problem is not merely anecdotal. Science bears out the athletes' experience.
Kolb, the Canadian researcher, visited Beijing in August to measure the air quality and other environmental conditions such as the heat. He gathered some disturbing evidence.
"In the two weeks I was there, I only saw the sky once," said Kolb, a professor at the University of Calgary and a consultant to the Canadian Olympic Committee.
"The pollution just kind of went from shades of blue to green to orange. It was a slightly different colour every day."
Scientists quantify the amount of airborne particulate matter, including sulphides, nitrates, ozone and dust, using an air pollution index. Zero is perfect air and 500 is "basically death," as Kolb described it.
Kolb said the Yukon is close to zero and North American cities are about 50, which is considered moderate to high. Toronto on its worst days might be 35 to 60.
In Beijing most days, "it's off the charts," said Kolb, who studied past environmental records and found that every day in August in the past five years had an air pollution index of more than 100. At least a third of those days were "pushing 200."
Kolb's research and his recommendations for coping with the conditions will be shared with the Canadian athletes heading to Beijing. He said athletes can do a lot to brace themselves for the heat -- training in hot climates, arriving early in Beijing to acclimatize and paying attention to their hydration, for example -- but not much can be done for pollution.
It's tempting to foresee a disastrous Olympics based on the bad air quality alone, with athletes choking on the air they breathe. But Kolb remains optimistic, almost certain that a blue sky will prevail.
"An event like the Olympics, because it means so much to China, is pushing them in the right direction to do the things that are right globally," he said.
If nothing else, Kolb added, there is also historical precedent to fall back on.
He said weather and environmental forecasters have been notoriously wrong in their predictions for the Games, dating back to 1896.
The weather at the London Olympics in 1912 and the Helsinki Games in 1952 was supposed to be cool, but was blazingly hot. The heavy pollution predicted for Los Angeles in 1984 did not materialize, thanks partly to some fresh offshore breezes that blew in unexpectedly, and the heat in Athens was not as bad as feared.
"Predictors can be wrong," Kolb said, chuckling.
Fair Use Statement: This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available, provided as informational resources only in support of the democratic process, consistent with the nonprofit, public-interest mission of Independent Arts & Media. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.