The French capital’s main waterway will be at the centre of the 2024 games’ opening ceremony, and authorities have been working hard to purge it of pollution.
After months of anticipation, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo finally dipped in the Seine River on Wednesday, nine days before the opening ceremony of the 2024 Olympic Games.
Clad in a wetsuit, Hidalgo plunged into the river near the imposing-looking City Hall, her office, and the Notre Dame Cathedral. Paris 2024 chief Tony Estanguet joined her.
They followed in the footsteps of French Sports Minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, who swam in the Seine on Saturday wearing a full-body suit.
It’s part of a broader effort to showcase the river’s improved cleanliness ahead of the summer games, which will kick off 26 July and host open-water swimming competitions.
Concerns over the Seine’s flow and pollution levels have persisted as the Olympics draw near, prompting daily water quality tests by the monitoring group Eau de Paris. Daily water quality tests in early June indicated unsafe levels of E. coli bacteria, but improvements have been seen since then.
The summer games will kick off on 26 July with a lavish open-air ceremony that includes an athletes’ parade on the river. The Seine will host several open-water swimming events during the games, including marathon swimming and the swimming legs of the Olympic and Paralympic triathlons.
Swimming in the Seine has been banned for over a century despite perennial promises to clean up the river. Jacques Chirac, the former French president, made a similar pledge in 1988 when he was Paris mayor, but it was never realised.
Since 2015, organisers have invested some €1.38 billion to prepare the Seine for the Olympics and to ensure Parisians have a cleaner river in the years after the games. The plan included constructing a giant underground water storage basin in central Paris, renovating sewer infrastructure, and upgrading wastewater treatment plants.
Initially planned for June, Hidalgo’s swim was postponed due to snap parliamentary elections in France. On the original date, the hashtag “jechiedanslaSeine” (“I’m pooping in the Seine”) was trending on social media as some threatened to protest the Olympics by defecating upstream.
