Of all the shit happening in Rio (some of it literal), the Australians seem to have gotten the worst of it. First their Olympic village accommodations were uninhabitable, mostly due to unfinished bathroom plumbing and unusable beds. So they decided to go stay in a hotel instead, which also kind of sucks because I can’t imagine that a hotel in Rio is anything to write home about. And then, to add insult to injury, the hotel caught fucking fire and they had all their shit stolen from it.
Via Esquire:
“…the Aussies arrived at their housing facilities in the Olympic village to find “blocked toilets, leaking pipes, and exposed wiring”—enough to make them refuse to move in. Things have escalated.
Having eventually agreed to settle into their new digs, the Australians had another nasty experience on Friday night. They were forced to evacuate the building when a fire was discovered in the basement, The Guardian reports, and about 100 team members were stranded outside for a half-hour. When they went back in, they discovered they’d been robbed: two laptops and a number of team jerseys were snatched in the mayhem.
“We did lose some shirts and a couple of laptops, one on the fifth floor from a cycling official and one in the office downstairs,” a spokesman told the paper.
To make matters (even) worse, the building’s fire alarms never went off, apparently because they were deactivated. This is a fairly significant safety issue. “Obviously that is completely unacceptable,” said Australian mission head Kitty Chiller, “that a) the fire alarm was disabled, and b) that if it had to be, that we weren’t warned about that.””
This is just bananas. This is like the plot from an Ocean’s movie. “Ok, let’s disable all the fire alarms and set the place on fire. Then, when they leave, we’ll sneak in and steal shit from their now empty rooms.” If I were the Australians, I’d probably just hit the road at this point. Unless they come out of this one with every athlete winning multiple gold medals, it all just feels like a bowlful of L’s for the entire team. Maybe the Brazilians know something that we don’t. Maybe the Australians are secretly breaking shit and inciting mass hysteria just to make Brazil look worse than it is. Or maybe the Olympics are actually just a total dumpster fire and Australia just keeps getting put in worse situations.