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 over two days. But Saturday’s event for women was postponed to Sunday due to pollution of the Seine, a consequence of heavy rains in the French capital.
“Below acceptable standards”
The French Swimming Federation (FFN), in collaboration with “the partners of the organization” in particular the International Federation World Aquatics, decided to bet everything on Sunday, initially the day of the competition for men. Hoping that the water quality improves. “Water quality continues to be closely monitored. A further update for the media is expected around 05:00 on August 6,” FFN said.
“The quality of the water in the Seine remains (…) below acceptable standards for safeguarding the health of swimmers”, wrote the FFN on Friday. “The Ile-de-France territory has suffered the strongest summer rainfall recorded in the last 20 years”, noted the town hall of Paris on Friday evening in a press release 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 future swimming promised for 2025 by the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo (PS), on three sites while swimming has been prohibited there since 1923.
A test for the Olympics
This scenario of persistent rain for several days, with stormy accents, was feared by the organizers. Indeed, these heavy rains cause the sewers to overflow and pollute 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.
The organizing committee of the Olympic Games, the town hall of Paris, the prefecture of the Île-de-France region, sports federations, among others, have been looking into water analyzes and weather forecasts for days. 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 lower than 1000 CFU for 100 ml so that the competition can take place.
Recurring controversies
Thursday evening, the organizing committee of the Olympic Games, which must use this competition to run in the course and equipment (pontoons, buoys, etc.), the town hall of Paris and the prefecture of the Île-de-France region, met wanted 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 deal with these meteorological events. exceptional”.
This is why among the worksites of the State and the communities for these bathings appear in particular works such as the Austerlitz basin, still under construction, which will make it possible to store rainwater (50,000 m3), and to 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 the event of storms 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 very polluted, also hit the headlines.