General view of athletes' accommodation can be seen during a guided tour for journalists to the 2016 Rio Olympics Village in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 23, 2016. [Photo/Agencies] |
RIO DE JANEIRO -- The problems reported by several Olympic delegations about the Olympic Village will be fixed before July 28, the Rio 2016 Organizing Committee pledged on Tuesday.
"All the Games have problems at first, due to the large number of people arriving. This has happened in other cities. It will be fixed quickly. We have detected the problems and are fixing them," said Rodrigo Tostes, executive director of operations for Rio 2016, at a press conference.
"Twenty-one buildings have already been delivered and the other 10 will be delivered in the next three days. We hope that, by Thursday, all the buildings will be delivered to the delegations," he said.
Since July 24, when the Olympic Village was officially inaugurated, delegations have complained about water, electricity and gas breaking down, trash piling up, exposed wiring, baths and showers being out of order and a lack of furniture.
The situation grew so bad that the Australian and Swiss delegations moved athletes out of the Olympic Village and into nearby hotels.
In response to the complaints, the Organizing Committee dispatched around 600 workers to fix all the problems on Monday.
However, Rio de Janeiro Mayor Eduardo Paes flirted with controversy at the weekend when he said the Olympic Village at Sydney 2000 had been worse, and that such problems "are natural" in events of this size.
The Olympic Village counts with 3,604 rooms across 31 buildings, was built with private funds and will be sold to the public after the Games is over.