Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin The Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, swims in the river Seine on July 17, 2024 to prove the iconic ...
[+] waterway is safe for swimmers of Olympic events. Getty Images After months of speculation, lots of testing for E.coli, an unpredictable general election and residents' threats to defecate in Paris' river Seine, it looks likely that swimming events in the iconic waterway will take place at the Olympic Games that opens in 9 days time—the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, finally swam in the river this morning to prove it is safe for athletes, rounding off an extremely political saga.
The Seine has been an open battleground for protesting the amount of money spent on the Olympic Games across Paris by those who thought it could be better spent on reducing wealth inequality in the city—protesters recently threatened to defecate in the Seine after the Mayor Anne Hidalgo and President Emmanuel Macron promised to swim in the river to show that it would be clean enough in time for the Games. In any event, it was Sports Minister Amelie Oudea-Castera, a keen political rival of the Parisian Mayor, who swam in the Seine on 13 July to prove its cleanliness. The Seine has been at the heart of Paris' bid to hold the Olympics; it has mostly used existing infrastructure to hold its events and swimming in the Seine is a return to old swimming patterns—the city held rowing, water polo and swimming events in the Seine during the 1904 Olympics and Parisians used to swim in the river until it was made illegal in 1923 due to high levels of bacteria.
In 1988, President Jacques Chirac, who was the then Mayor of Paris, promised that the Seine would be clean enough for people to swim in it by 1994. It wasn't until 2 May 2024 though, that the city unveiled a giant tank, the size of 20 Olympic-sized swimming pools, that is intended to take all of the river Seine's runoff, thus improving the water quality when it rains. It's been a key political pledge that the Paris organizers have staked their reputations against—athletes remember all too well what happened in London in the 2012 Olympics when hundreds of swimmers developed nausea, diarrhea, cramps and vomiting after swimming a race in the river Thames.
Paris' motto since 1865 has been 'Fluctuat nec mergitur' which can be translated as 'S/he is tossed by the waves but does not sink', something that Politico used, tongue in cheek, to describe the Mayor of Paris' swim in the Seine this morning with Olympic organisers. The water was 20 degrees, the sky sunny and the bacteria levels lower than the levels she had promised to swim in, reports FranceInfo . MORE FOR YOU ‘The Acolyte’ Episode 8 Recap And Review: A Dreadful Season Finale And The Cameos Can’t Save It Amazon Prime Day 2024: Our Deals Editors Found The 100 Best Discounts So Far Apple Warns Millions Of iPhone Users—Stop Using Google Chrome Earlier this week, Paris City Hall announced river quality in the Seine has been good enough to swim in for most of the past 12 days, an unexpected turn considering the city has suffered from very heavy rainfall recently which usually leads to a surplus of water runoff in the river.
City Hall official Pierre Rabadan told reporters then, that he was confident that the events would go ahead although they might need modifications—he didn't elaborate on what those modifications might be. The E.coli levels (that indicate the presence of faecal matter) at the place scheduled to be the start of the swimming races, at Pont Alexandre III, were above the acceptable limits of sports federations, as reported by France 24.
At times in the months leading up to the Olympic Games, the E.coli levels have been ten times the permitted amount for swimming, although organisers argued that those samples were taken over the winter months, in periods of less sunlight and stronger currents (neither of which allow the bacteria to be killed off as quickly by the sun's UV rays). function loadConnatixScript(document) { if (!window.
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Paris City Hall plans to keep the Seine clean to open three sites to the public in 2025, at Bras Marie, Grenelle and Bercy (in the 4th, 15th and 12th arrondissements respectively). It is hoped that the weather will be dry in the remaining days before the Opening Ceremony of the Games on Friday 26th July..
