Plan to pump untreated sewage into Lake Ontario's West Channel is anti-sport

Triathlon is a contact sport.

I learned that quirky fact back in 2015, when a group of Canadian triathletes described how they planned to navigate the 1,500-metre open-water swim at the Pan Am Games in Toronto on a course laid out just north of Ontario Place. They explained that athletes don't intentionally smash each other in these mass-start races, but when hundreds of people hit the water simultaneously, swimming to the same finish line, you brace yourself to take some knocks.

Collisions. Elbow strikes. Black eyes. Broken noses. All job hazards in big open-water swim races.

On Wednesday, the Toronto Star reported that the Ontario provincial government, as part of its plan to lease Ontario Place's valuable real estate to a private spa operator, intends to empty sewer pipes into the West Channel, the same stretch of water that hosted the Pan Am Games triathlon, and which is still in use by rowers, open-water swimmers and other water sports enthusiasts.

But I misspoke there, too, unfairly casting the E.coli bacteria as the only pathogen floating around on a race course full of sewer sludge. You can also get gastroenteritis from viruses, which also abound in wastewater. These sewer pipes would offer swimmers a variety of ways to get sick, not just the most obvious one.

Local stakeholders have assailed the plan as short-sighted, which it is.

"The absolute worst place for an overflow sewage outlet is in shallow water with no current," said Darrell Brown, the chief executive of the Canadian National Exhibition Association, in an interview with the Toronto Star.

It's also anti-sport.

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