The key to Olympic success: Bleach

LOS ANGELES – The list of necessities an Olympian requires to excel in Rio de Janeiro is long: the right athletic gear, the right nutrition, the right coaching.

The right bleach.

While gymnasts and basketball players will only need the usual equipment for their trip to Brazil (plus some mosquito repellent), water sport athletes like sailors and rowers are training for battle against more than opponents. The fetid, foul state of the water in Rio warrants some strange precautions.

Gevvie Stone, a Princeton product and single scull rower who competed in the 2012 London Games, dutifully explained here Monday at the Team USA Media Summit how she will need hand sanitizer, a plastic baggie for her water bottle (so that the splashing bay water doesn’t contact her lips) and bleach (so she can scrub the handles of her oars).

Last summer, the Associated Press found that Rio water had viruses linked to human sewage that tested at levels 1.7 million times what would be highly alarming in the United States.

"We’re talking about an extreme environment," Kristina Mena, an expert in waterborne viruses at the University of Texas Health Science Center, told the AP. "Where the pollution is so high that exposure is imminent and the chance of infection very likely."

At the World Junior Rowing Championships in Rio last year, 13 American rowers got sick, and the team doctor suggested the water might be to blame. That's why Stone and others will be bleaching their handles, which up until now has only been protocol to avoid staph infection from shared oars. The other precaution she said she was taking was "not flipping over."

It’s silly and sad that this once-in-a-lifetime achievement has veered into a cross between "Survivor" and "Outbreak." But if any group of athletes can deal with this, it’s rowers.

Their sport is not like golf or baseball, where issues with the field of play are abhorrent and reason for carping. There are headwinds, tailwinds, eddies and inscrutable currents. Stone said referees, who are also in boats, sometimes cause a wake at launch. So do video crews trailing behind. She even mentioned a time when rowers had to be cautioned about marsh grasses in the water.

"You roll with the punches," Stone said. "You’re used to it."

This attitude is somewhat endemic to rowing, as the sport is grueling, repetitive and just plain uncomfortable. There is no celebrity status, no cereal box, no "Dancing With The Stars." Stone is already done with medical school, which she completed while rowing through frigid Massachusetts temperatures, sometimes with her dad, sometimes alone. Her hands are so calloused that the staph infection some rowers fear are not even a concern. Nobody is used to competing in filthy water, but Stone is stoic even in the face of all the ugly headlines.

"A bunch of the U.S. team got ill [last year]," she said, "but they were the only country to get significantly ill. When you race in any country, one or two athletes always get sick."

Stone also pointed to someone who flipped over in the Rio water and had no ill effects.

"She credits it to rowing in Narragansett Bay on Rhode Island," Stone jokes.

So no, she’s not thrilled about the layers of precautions she has to take, but she’s not mortified either. Stones actually says she’s more worried about getting sick for other reasons leading up to trials. If that happens, it’s a risk to her even making the Olympic team. Few of us spectators would go anywhere near the water in Rio, but none of us spectators have the opportunity Stone has. Whatever happens this summer, her career will end by the fall.

And that opportunity is one she takes seriously, as her father, Gregg, could have rowed in the Olympics in 1980 if not for the U.S. boycott of the Moscow Games. He went on to a successful law career, but he confessed to his daughter that he wished he kept his dreams going and competed in 1984.

If she qualifies for the Rio Games, Stone will take her sanitizer and her baggie and her bleach and her stuffed polar bear Abby, and she'll risk it. You get over illness, but you might not get over missing an Olympics.

Oh, and about the Zika virus, that other threat to health in Rio? Well, Stone is just as unfazed about that.

"I’m not planning on getting pregnant," she says, "anytime soon."