Away from the grime of the athletes village in Rio, Team GB's £1.6million Olympic training base is the envy of the world

28/07/2016

 

Words by Martha Kelner, pictures by Andy Hooper 

• Team GB are preparing for the Rio Olympics at a training base in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte
• The preparation camp is designed to make the athletes feel as at home as possible ahead of the Games
• The £1.6million training base includes the only indoor 50m pool in Brazil outside Rio de Janiero
• Greg Rutherford and Jessica Ennis-Hill have opted to do their final preparation away from Belo Horizonte

Adam Peaty and his swimming team-mates are sitting on sofas strewn with Union flag cushions and throws, watching a repeat of the London 2012 opening ceremony.

We are in Belo Horizonte in south-eastern Brazil but the surroundings, where Team GB have their Olympic preparation camp, are designed to make gold-medal favourites like Peaty feel at home.

Posters branded with Team GB’s slogan Bring On The Great are everywhere and even the entrance to the doping control room has a Union flag doormat. 

‘In London it was incredibly easy, you know how everything works and speak the language,’ says Paul Ford, who as head of pre-Games training has been here to prepare for this fortnight 18 times in the past five years. ‘It’s very different at an away Games,’ he adds.

‘You have to make it feel like any other training camp they might go on and remove all the stresses so they can focus purely on their job. It’s about giving them the best platform to have the best opportunity to do well.

‘It’s also about mimicking the athletes’ village. In their hotel here there is a rolling shuttle and if they’re not there on time it will leave without them, just like it would at the Olympics.’

Inside the performance gym 100 metres breaststroke world record-holder Peaty looks in supreme physical condition as he does press-ups.

Upstairs in the only indoor 50m pool in Brazil outside Rio de Janiero, Fran Halsall, who is preparing for her third Olympics, laughs as she tries to work an underwater filming device to record her stroke. A local volunteer charged with minimising germs is spraying the TV remote control with disinfectant, leaving nothing to chance.

The swimming team, whose competition starts on the first day of the Games, arrived last Saturday and are based at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). ‘The local media were asking why the Brazilian team hadn’t been given these facilities,’ says Ford. ‘They are the envy of the world but we got out early and secured it for ourselves.’ 

The total bill for the preparation camp, footed by the National Lottery, is £1.6million. The track and field athletes, archers and rugby sevens team are also based at UFMG and the weightlifting, table tennis, judo and boxing teams will prepare across town at the Minas Tennis Club.

Olympic and world boxing champion Nicola Adams was there on Wednesday, taking selfies with team-mates Lawrence Okolie and Anthony Fowler between sparring and gym sessions.

Long jumper Greg Rutherford and heptathlete Jessica Ennis-Hill have opted to do their final preparation away from Belo Horizonte to minimise their time in Brazil because of fears over the Zika virus, which can cause serious birth defects. Mosquitoes which carry the virus are more prevalent here than in Rio but Ford says that moving the camp away from the city was never considered.

‘It was a total no-brainer,’ he says. ‘We’ve got the best facilities here and it’s just about doing what we can before getting to Rio and cracking on.’

Every athlete was given a canister of high-strength insect repellent when they collected their Team GB kit before travelling and 200 spare canisters and plug-ins to ward off the mosquitoes. 

Zika is just one problem threatening to overshadow the build-up to the Games, which begin in just eight days’ time. Spain’s Olympic team chief Cayetano Cornet said the athletes’ village is in a ‘critical’ condition and claimed many apartments are ‘uninhabitable’ and flooding. His concerns come after the Australian team refused to move into the village because of exposed wiring and leaking sewage pipes.

Cornet has encountered plumbing, electrical and cleaning problems since moving into the village on Sunday with other members of the Spanish team.

‘The Olympic village is beautiful but the interior of the buildings present deficiencies that have led to a critical situation,’ he said. ‘It’s normal that new buildings have problems. However, the problem is that the number of deficiencies are many.

‘What is most worrying is that there are many apartments that are uninhabitable and are flooded. That raises an alarm because there are apartments that also have electricity issues and that mix of water and electricity concerns everyone.’

The British Olympic Association have retained the services of a plumber for the whole of the Games but maintain Team GB are housed in blocks of apartments that are in a better state of repair than those where other nations are staying. 

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