In 2017, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo highlighted the key role the famous river would play as an Olympic venue as the city puts the finishing touches on its preparations to host the 2024 Summer Olympics. A few days from now, the river will host the historic Opening Ceremony, the first to be held outside a stadium.
The famous river also hosts an open water swimming event for triathletes and marathon runners. The Seine was the obvious choice for this event, as it flows alongside some of Paris’ most famous landmarks, notably the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame Cathedral. But there’s just one problem: swimming in the river has been banned for a century due to the amount of rubbish and wastewater that ends up in it.
This is not the first time that swimming events have been at risk of being cancelled due to water quality issues – similar headlines were made at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics – but both times the events were successful and Paris is hoping for a similar outcome.
The road to cleaning up the Seine was not an easy one. The first test on the river was abandoned. The concentration of E. coli in the water exceeds the acceptable limit.
Last month, when Mayor Hidalgo and President Macron proposed swimming in the river to prove it was safe for Olympic swimming events, Parisians showed visible dissatisfaction with a “poop protest.”
