If strong tides, dense fog and light winds weren t enough, the Chinese Olympic Sailing venue has thrown a new obstacle at our sailors during their training in Qingdao. Weed. The thick green algae is currently being tackled by fishing boats as they desperately try to clean up carpet thick weed that is causing all sorts of issues for our sailors.

Iain Percy, Olympic Gold Medallist and Beijing 08 Star class campaigner who has tried sailing through the stuff (above) said, It s appeared in patches the size of football pitches. What seems to be the fishing fleet of Eastern China has been moved on to seaweed collection duty.

Nick Rogers said: They will deal with it before the Olympics, but we still have to train here and it s making some people s training pretty hard. I ve heard it s been a lot worse than this, and I ve heard that it s been really difficult for some of the training earlier on.