The Mayor of Paris has donned herself in a wetsuit and goggles to swim about a hundred metres up and down the Seine river. Anne Hidalgo wanted to prove the point that the Seine was safe and ready to be swam in, less than ten days out from the Paris Olympic Games.
“The Seine is exquisite,” Hidalgo said in the water. “The water is very, very good. A little cool, but not so bad.’’
“It’s very, very cool to be here and it was a dream and now it’s real … after the Games we will have a swimming pool in the river for all the people, for the Parisian people and for the tourists also.”
The 483 mile river is set to be used for the swimming leg of the Olympics triathlon on July 30 to 31 and August 5, and the open-water swimming on August 8 and 9.
On Wednesday, the 65-year old Socialist mayor swam in the murky grey waters of the famous river to prove that the water is clean enough for outdoor Olympic swimming events. She was joined by a select group of swimmers and reporters, in the first legal swim of the century.
It comes just twelve months after France announced a 1.4 billion euros ($AUS2.2 billion) investment into preventing sewage and other waste leaking into the waterway.
“Make the Seine and the Marne swimmable,” French President Emmanuel Macron wrote on X at the time. “This is our objective for 2024. 1.4 billion euros invested, half of which by the State. At [500 days out], we are on track to achieve what will be one of the greatest legacies of the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games.”
President Macron had previously vowed to join Hidalgo and her colleagues in the water, but failed to show up on Wednesday.
The day before Hidalgo’s swim, her office released a statement: “On the eve of the Games, when the Seine will play a key role, this event represents the demonstration of the efforts made by the city and the state to improve the quality of the Seine’s waters and the ecological state of the river.”
Hidalgo was accompanied in the water by the French canoeing gold medalist Tony Estanguet, and Marc Guillaume, a senior government official for the Paris region.
“Today is a confirmation that we are exactly where we meant to be,” Estanguet, who is the the head of the Paris Games, said. “We are now ready to organise the games in the Seine.”
Last week, he told AFP: “We’re not doing it for three days of competition in the Seine. We’re going it above all for environmental reasons … I’m proud that we’ve served as an accelerator.”
The trio’s swim was delayed by a few weeks after samples taken of the water showed high levels of E. coli bacteria and the presence of contaminants linked to fecal bacteria.
Heavy rain throughout May and June caused the discharge of untreated effluent into the river. Even just a week ago, a monitoring group from the mayor’s office tested the water and found that E. coli levels were still high in parts of the river, though the cessation of rain has meant that the levels have dropped in recent days.
One representative from Surfrider, the international clean-water campaign group, said that summer has been “very late to arrive and so have the good results.”
“It’s been raining all over France,” Marc Valmassoni said. “They’re not excellent, they’re not terrible, they’re average. But at this time the water is swimmable.”
The river will host some of the most eagerly anticipated events in the Paris Olympics, including the men’s and women’s 10 kilometre marathon swimming races and the 1,500 metre swimming section of three triathlon events.
Not everyone is happy. Many who believe the money used to clean up the river is excessively and unnecessarily eating up tax payer funds.
Hundreds signed up to participate in a “poop protest” which encouraged people to defecate into the river on certain days to ensure that levels of toxins remain high. The movement spurred on the hashtag #JeChieDansLaSeineLe23Juin (“I shit in the Seine on June 23” — as Hidalgo had previously marked June 23rd as the day she’d take her river swim) and inspired memes showing an almost naked President Macron standing in the riverbed covered in faeces.
Historically, swimming the Seine has been illegal, and deemed too polluted and toxic for even fish to survive.