The Smoglympics
According to an article in the washingtonpost.com, recent measurements show that on some days the amount of smoke and dust particles in the Beijing air exceeds, by 3 to 12 times, the maximum deemed safe by the World Health Orgnization. David Martin, a respiratory expert who is helping train U.S. marathoners said, “The magnitude of the pollution in Beijing is not something we know how to deal with. It’s a foreign environment. It’s like feeding an athlete poison.” Typically athletes arrive at least 10 days prior to the event to allow them to acclimate but this year many of the 10,000 Olympians scheduled to descend on Beijing will show up just 72 hours prior to their event.
How bad is it?
“Jeremy Horgan-Kobelski, a Boulder, Colo., bicyclist who competed in the 2004 Olympics in Athens and is a contender for a spot on this year’s U.S. mountain biking team, said that when he arrived in the Chinese capital, the sky was a crystal-clear blue and he thought that concerns about pollution had been overblown. But on the day he was to race, he said, the smog was so thick “you could barely see a few city blocks” from his hotel window.
About 20 minutes into the race, Horgan-Kobelski started having trouble breathing.
“I struggled with it for a while,” he said in a phone interview. “You’re breathing as hard as you can but you feel like your muscles don’t want to work. You’re filling your lungs but you don’t know what’s going in there.”
About halfway through the roughly 30-mile race, Horgan-Kobelski said, “my body sort of shut down.” He pulled over and vomited.
It wasn’t until he got to the athletes’ lounge that he learned that he wasn’t unique. Only eight of 47 contestants in the men’s race finished; the others, including the Chinese riders, also suffered from breathing problems and dropped out.”
According to the article, Beijing officials are not oblivious to the problem and have spent upwards of $16.4 billion moving the heaviest polluters out of the city, planting trees, rerouting traffic and inducing rain. The Chinese government is even considering closing factories and banning cars during the Olympics, an option that local business aren’t real keen to warning of devastating economic consequences. The photo above was posted by rytc on flickr with the description “The smog was unbelieveable in Beijing. The grey here is not rain or cloud, but thick smelly smog. The stadium however, was pretty cool”
Check out a report launched a few months ago by Friends of the Earth International with 9 testimonies from community members around the globe who have dramatic first-hand experience of the devastating impacts of climate change.
