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Athletes dive into the Seine River from the Alexander III bridge on the start of the first leg of the women’s triathlon test event for the 2024 Paris Olympics in Paris in August 2023. Michel Euler/AP
July 16, 2024
(Laura King~LAT)Less than two weeks before Paris inaugurates its first Olympic Games in a century, the Seine — remains the designated venue for marathon and triathlon swimming events during the global sports festival despite readings over the summer that turned up high levels of E. coli bacteria, which indicates the presence of fecal matter.
Despite an expensive and ambitious antipollution initiative, officials acknowledge that a single drenching downpour at an inopportune moment could send a surge of sewage into the waterway.
The Mayor of Paris promised to swim in the Seine this week as a show of confidence in its Olympic readiness, although she bowed out of a June pledge to do so.
France’s sports minister, Amelie Oudea-Castera, took a plunge this month, although some onlookers noted that she didn’t stay in the water for very long.
Further discouraging high-profile plans to take a dip, online activists, unleashing an abundance of scatological puns, threatened last month to defecate in the river en masse as an expression of frustration with politicians over pressing social issues.
While meteorologists say the forecast between now and the start of the Games is for hot and sunny weather that will help keep waterborne bacteria levels down, the Olympic organizing committee has confirmed there are backup plans in place if the Seine is deemed unsuitable for competitive swimming — which, as many commentators have noted, involves concerted open-mouthed gasping for air.
Visitors were diplomatic about how clean the river might be for the Games.
In the meantime, an elaborate web of grandstands and scaffolding is going up on the riverbanks in preparation for the opening ceremony — a grand east-to-west boat parade through central Paris.
“There’s so much that people are worried about these days — we hope the Olympics will be safe for all, including the swimmers,” said Marie-Helene Marin, a sixtyish shop assistant and lifelong Parisienne who was walking her wrinkly-faced pug a few blocks from the river. “But when all this is over, whatever happens, it will still be our Seine.”
