Paris 2024: the Seine "below health standards", a postponed test

This Saturday, August 5, swimmers should have started in the Seine for an open water swimming World Cup event, qualifying for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. Due to too high pollution of the Seine, the event was postponed to Sunday. Competitors will not know until Sunday at... 5:00 am if they will be able to swim or not this weekend.

Anne Hidalgo poses with swimmers at the inauguration of the Bras Marie nautical base in Paris on July 9, during which she announced the swimmable Seine for 2025. AFP - BERTRAND GUAY

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Will swim, won't swim? It is at dawn on Sunday that participants in the pre-Olympic swimming test competition in the Seine will know if the river is clean enough to dive in. This Open Water Swimming World Cup event was originally scheduled to last two days. But Saturday's event for women was postponed to Sunday due to pollution of the Seine, a consequence of heavy rains on the French capital.

The French Swimming Federation (FFN), in collaboration with "the organization's partners" including the International Federation World Aquatics, has decided to bet everything on Sunday, initially, the day of the competition for men. Hoping that water quality improves... "Water quality continues to be closely monitored. A new update for the media is expected around 05:00 on August 6," the FFN said.

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The quality of the water of the Seine remains (...) below acceptable standards for safeguarding swimmers' health " wrote Friday the FFN. These competitions in the Seine are also preludes to the future swimming promised for 2025 by the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo (PS), on three sites, while swimming has been banned since 1923.

A test for the Olympics

This scenario of persistent rains for several days, with stormy accents, was feared by the organizers. Indeed, these heavy rains overflow the sewers and come to defile the Seine. This Open Water Swimming World Cup event, between the Alexandre III Bridge and the Alma Bridge - 10 km swum in a loop - is above all a test event for the Paris Olympics in a year's time.

The organizing committee of the Olympics, the mayor of Paris, the prefecture of the Île-de-France region, sports federations, among others, have been looking for days on water analyses and weather forecasts. Thursday evening, the organizing committee of the Olympics, which must use this competition to break in courses and equipment (pontoons, buoys ...), the mayor of Paris and the prefecture of the Île-de-France region, wanted to be reassuring.

Recurrent controversies

According to them, "one year before the Games, the sanitation dynamic continues with the completion of the most significant water quality improvement works in the coming months, in particular to cope with these exceptional weather events".

This is why among the projects of the State and local authorities for these baths include structures such as the Austerlitz basin, still under construction, which will make it possible to store rainwater (50,000 m³), and operate in 2024. For the Olympic event, the organizers have long planned to be able to postpone the events by two or three days, in case of thunderstorms and heavy rain.

An Olympic discipline since 2008, open water swimming is regularly talked about. In Tokyo, at the end of the test event in 2019, swimmers protested against the quality of the water in Tokyo Bay, which was also overheated. At the Rio Olympics in 2016, the prospect of swimming in Guanabara Bay, also heavily polluted, also made headlines.

(With AFP

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