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The Seine at the Pont Alexandre III, the start and end point of the triathlon for the Paris Olympics.
Photographer: Cyril MarcilhacyWould You Swim in the Seine? Paris Is Hoping Olympic Athletes Will
France has allocated €1.4 billion to clean up the river, and President Macron and Paris Mayor Hidalgo have pledged to take a dip to show it’s Olympics-safe.
In 1988, the late French President Jacques Chirac — then the mayor of Paris — famously bragged that he would swim in the Seine to show how clean it was. He never did.
More than 35 years on and with some €1.4 billion ($1.5 billion) earmarked for the river’s clean-up, the current Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has made a similar pledge, with a lot more at stake. To show the Seine is ready for the 2024 Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games that kick off toward the end of the month, she has promised a swim this week — after having postponed it once before. President Emmanuel Macron has committed to a dip at some point. On Saturday, Sports Minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéra swam a few meters in a body suit and said, “we kept our promise.”
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It remains to be seen, however, if that show of faith from French leaders will convince Olympic athletes to take the plunge. Earlier this year, Brazil’s reigning open-water champion Ana Marcela Cunha said “the Seine is not made for swimming.”
Getting the river cleaned for the races and for the French capital’s residents once the games are over is something of a heritage project for France. Yet for all the efforts, the key determinant of its success is something local authorities have no control over: the weather. A streak of rainy days can lead the city’s sewage system to overflow, bringing waste waters and their bacteria into the Seine and pouring the money spent on the cleanup — literally — down the drain. A drippy June did little to assuage those fears: the Seine’s Olympics swim spot was mostly un-swimmable in the month. Paris authorities were more upbeat for July.
The gigantic undertaking, which effectively puts an end to a century-old ban on swimming in the Seine, has drawn attention from across the globe. Announced as part of the city’s bid to host the games, the project’s challenges mirror those faced by large metropolises like London and Sydney that sit on a body of water they can’t always fully capitalize on.
“For almost a century, the Seine has been used for boats — either with tourists or freight,” Pierre Rabadan, a former rugby player who’s now the deputy Paris mayor in charge of sports, said in an interview. “No one really cared about it... With the games, we’ve brought (its cleanup) back to the forefront.”
Talk of making the Seine swim-worthy has drawn derision from Parisians, who over the years have seen bulky items — from bicycles to rusty washing machines — fished out of the river. Aware of the decades of underinvestment in the city’s sewage system and the faulty ways in which Parisians’ feces are dealt with, the idea that an unpopular mayor and an equally disliked president would take a swim provoked gallows humor on social media. Hashtags emerged, calling on people to ensure there’d be a lot of bacteria in the river when Hidalgo and Macron swim.
More seriously, however, Paris has staked its reputation on the project, spending hundreds of millions in taxpayers’ money and pledging several swimming spots every summer.
For the Olympics, the plan is to have 55 male and 55 female triathletes jump off a floating pontoon at the base of the iconic Pont Alexandre III on July 30 and 31. After a 1.5-kilometer swim, they’re scheduled to bike on the fabled Champs-Elysées, Boulevard Saint-Germain and even by the National Assembly. The race is set to finish where it started after four running laps through the heart of Paris. About a week later, marathon swimmers will take the plunge from the same site.
The pre-games picture has hardly been encouraging. At one point in June, levels of E.Coli — bacteria that show the presence of faecal matter — at the Alexandre III spot were 10 times the upper limit authorized by sport federations. The culprit — unseasonal rainfall.
The consequences for athletes of swimming in a dirty river are well known. In 2012, hundreds of swimmers fell sick after taking part in a 2.25-mile long race in the Thames, in the London area, showing such symptoms as nausea, diarrhea, abdominal cramps or vomiting in the days that followed, according to a study by UK public health authorities. Four were hospitalized.
“We know what the Pont Alexandre III and the Eiffel Tower represent but I think that the health of the athletes must come first,” Brazil’s Cunha said in March.
Still, on Saturday, French Paralympic triathlete Alexis Hanquinquant, who swam with Sports Minister Oudéa-Castéra, said it was a “very pleasant” experience, adding that he was fed up with the doubts that the press has instilled in people’s minds.
Another concern for swimmers: according to data published in July by Paris authorities, the water flow in the Seine is more than three times what it usually is for this time of year, making the river dangerous to swim in. If the situation fails to improve, a plan B for marathon swimmers has been designated east of Paris.
In a Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung interview last week, German Olympic champion Florian Wellbrock said even if the pollution levels are under control, the river’s strong currents would be a problem.
To address contamination issues, Mayor Hidalgo in May inaugurated a large underground reservoir that’s been likened to a cathedral with huge pillars. As she strolled through it with a white hard hat, she said the 50,000 cubic-meter tank would make possible Parisians’ “childhood dream of being able to swim in this river.”
The reservoir was built to hold back more of the sewage overflows during heavy showers. Jean-Marie Mouchel, a hydrology professor at the Sorbonne University, says while it’s helpful, it won’t entirely address the issue if there are significant downpours.
“It is very near central Paris and would have a strong positive impact on localized storms,” Mouchel said. But it only increases the full storage capacity — which stands at about 1 million cubic meters for the Paris area — by about 5%. “The total amount of rainwater during a big storm may be much larger,” he said.
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Tens of millions of euros of public money have been poured into other major projects, including upgrading the region’s water-treatment plants. French authorities have also dealt with a more mundane task: getting locals to stop pumping their toilet waste into the river. Tens of thousands of houses along the Seine — in hamlets and towns upstream — weren’t connected to the public sewage system. Many still aren’t, and there are few legal ways to make it mandatory.
To bring the message home, local authorities created a website showing a graphic image of a man in a dress shirt and tie sitting on a toilet that directly empties into the Seine. They have held public meetings and provided financial incentives. For the Paris area, the objective was to connect about half the estimated 20,000 households to the network, according to Paris City official Rabadan. Owners of houseboats in Paris were also asked to connect waste-water systems to the public sewage network.
Claire Costel, who began managing the project in an eastern suburb of Paris in 2020, quickly realized the enormity of the task. Estimations showed that corrective action was needed in as many as 12,300 points just in her district. In about a quarter of them, households’ waste water flowed directly into the Seine.
“I took the challenge head on,” Costel said in an interview, adding that her project is on track, by her own estimation, to prevent as many as an annual 3 million cubic meters of filthy water pouring into the Seine by the end of the year.
Paris isn’t the only city trying to make urban swimming possible. Zurich, Munich and Copenhagen have done it. Sydney is upgrading its sewer system to reduce overflows into the Parramatta river and make it swim-worthy by 2025. In the UK, the London Port Authority is working with the three main water operators to reduce similar sewage spills into the Thames.
London also built a 25-kilometer (16-mile) long super sewer, known as the Thames Tideway Tunnel, with a capacity of 600 Olympic swimming pools of liquid to reduce overflows. The project, estimated at about £4.5 billion ($5.8 billion), is now completed and is set to be fully operational in 2025. It should cut overflows by 95%.
Paris hasn’t spent as much, and Philippe Dallier, the mayor of Pavillons-sous-Bois who sits on the board of the Greater Paris sanitation authority, says more is needed to make swimming in the Seine a reality every summer. He sees the total cost eventually increasing by more than €500 million.
“Unlike rain, money is not going to fall from the sky,” Dallier said.
Meanwhile, officials say the project is ready for the Olympic Games. But Mouchel notes that even on sunny days, races might eventually be canceled.
“We recently discovered bacteria levels can vary by as much as 10 times in one day, even when it doesn’t rain,” Mouchel said. “It’s hard to explain why this happens, but it adds a new source of uncertainty.”
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