Paris 2024 Olympics: Seine polluted, swimming test events on hold

Europe 1 with AFP / Photo credit: BRUNO DE HOGUES / ONLY FRANCE / ONLY FRANCE VIA AFP 15:50 pm, August 05, 2023

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 into. 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.

"Below acceptable standards"

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.

>> READ ALSO - Paris 2024 Olympic Games: the open water swimming test competition in the Seine threatened by pollution

"The quality of the water of the Seine remains (...) below acceptable standards for safeguarding the health of swimmers," the FFN wrote on Friday. "The Ile-de-France territory has suffered the heaviest summer rainfall recorded over the last 20 years," noted the mayor of Paris Friday evening in a statement where it details all the work undertaken for the bathing plan of the State and the city.

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. The "temporary degradation of water quality", according to the IDF prefecture, raises the most scrutinized rate, that of the presence of the intestinal bacterium Escherichia coli. World Aquatics imposes for this bacterium a rate of less than 1000 CFU per 100 ml for the competition to take place.

Recurrent controversies

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

>> READ ALSO - Paris: swimming in the Seine will be possible in 2025

This is why among the projects of the State and communities for these baths include structures such as the Austerlitz basin, still under construction, which will 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.