Nine days before the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics, Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of the French capital on Wednesday took a dip in the Seine River, fulfilling a promise to show the river was clean enough to host the Games’ outdoor swimming events.
Sporting a wetsuit and goggles, Hidalgo swam in the famed waterway as hundreds of onlookers watched from the riverbanks and fulfilled a promise she made back in January. The event was initially delayed due to heavy rain and concerns about water quality.
She was joined by Tony Estanguet, the head of the Paris Olympics Organising Committee. She started by paddling and then swam the front crawl. After the swim, Hidalgo confirmed that the water quality was good, though a bit cool.
The pair swam along the stretch of the river that passes by City Hall and the Notre Dame Cathedral in a bid to showcase the river’s improved cleanliness. After the swim, Hidalgo expressed her satisfaction at being able to finally deliver on her promise.
“We have worked very, very hard and then you go down into the water and it seems natural. The Seine is exquisite. The water is very, very good. A little cool, but not so bad,” she said.
Estanguet, who has three Olympic gold medals in canoeing, said, “After 20 years of doing sports in the river, I find it admirable that we are trying to clean it up.”
Paris has made significant efforts to clean the Seine, including building a large storage basin for wastewater ahead of the Games, starting July 26. Swimming at the Seine was banned for over a century, and it was since 2015 when the Paris Olympics organisers invested approximately $1.4 billion euros to prepare the river for the quadrennial showpiece event.
Despite that, the Seine had until recently repeatedly failed daily water quality tests. Hidalgo had originally planned to swim in June, but had to delay her dip because bacteria indicating the presence of faecal matter were found to be sometimes 10 times higher than authorised limits.
On the initial date, the hashtag ”jechiedanslaSeine” (“I’m pooping in the Seine”) trended on social media as some threatened to protest against the Olympics – and Hidalgo – by defecating upstream. But since the beginning of July, as heavy rains finally gave way to sunnier weather, the samples have shown the river to be ready for the open-water swimming and triathlon events.
However, decisions on whether to hold these events in the Seine will be made just before each event by a technical committee. If the river water does not meet health standards, the marathon swimming event will be moved to Vaires-sur-Marne, and the triathlon will be changed to a duathlon.