Algae clogs Olympics venue in China

QINGDAO, China – 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 more than a month. Athletes call it the blob, the carpet, the fairway.

“We almost think of it as land,” said Carrie Howe, a member of the U.S. 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 are trying to make the stuff go away. Hundreds of soldiers cleaned it up by hand in a seaside park Wednesday. About 10,000 ordinary citizens were doing the same along the shore, while more than 1,200 fishing and other boats hauled it in by net, the workers smiling and flashing the two-fingered victory sign to journalists.

“We all need to pitch in,” said Gao Shaofan, a massage parlor employee who was stuffing the algae into plastic sacks with her co-workers. “This is the worst it’s ever been that we know.”

Chinese officials promised at a news conference Wednesday that the Olympics competition area, all 19 square miles of it, will be clear of the algae before races begin Aug. 9.

“Actually, we don’t have a backup,” Qu Chun, the sailing competition manager, said to a small chorus 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 miles 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 farther down the coast.

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.

“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,” U.S. sailor Andrew Campbell wrote in his blog last week.

Scattered 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. “Everyone’s a bit skeptical about how they will get it done,” Howe said.

Chinese officials have appealed to Qingdao’s civic pride – and fishermen’s wallets – to fight the algae with the goal of clearing the competition zone by July 15.

Already, 170 tons have been cleared away, said Zang Aimin, an executive board member of the Beijing Organizing Committee.

“As far as protecting the competition area, I’m confident we can do it,” she said.