About The Whole Alligator Olympic Golf Course Story...
/One thing we've already learned about the Rio 2016 games: coverage of the course creation, opening and the games may be severely hampered by a lack of understanding...of golf.
Depressingly, Bloomberg's Tariq Panja penned a story picked up everywhere I looked about caimans (alligators) being driven out of their lagoons around Rio and by the sounds of it, every single one of them is congregating on the Olympic golf course under construction.
The buried lede in this story?
The course actually now has lagoons for them to live in! That means the lakes on the property have been dug out and construction is actually progressing. (You may recall I visited in May and filed this report. The lakes weren't even on the radar then. Of course, neither was a functional baggage claim and customs system at the airport.)
As for the possibility of spectators being attacked during Olympic play, something raised by the Bloomberg story?
The IGF's Anthony Scanlon explained why this is not an issue:
“The other thing to remember about these alligators is, if they do arrive, they arrive at night and we won’t be playing golf at night,” Scanlon said on a visit to Rio. “I don’t think we’re going to get a bite.”
There was another story today summing up the overall issue with aligators and giant rodent sized animals in the Olympic Village area. Now that sounds like a bigger issue! The golf?
We'll just be happy if the Brazilians allow this to be completed on time.