Green light for the triathlon of the 2024 Olympic Games: after months of doubts about the quality of the water in the Seine and an embarrassing first postponement, the two events took place on Wednesday. A relief for the athletes, the organizers and the authorities, who escaped the rain on Tuesday evening.
Time was beginning to press. A final fallback date was planned for Friday if the results of the latest bacteriological analyses were still inconclusive, but the threat was becoming more and more concrete.
And the storm from Tuesday night to Wednesday could have raised fears of a further deterioration in water quality just before the event.
Although “it didn’t pass far”, admitted regional prefect Marc Guillaume, “it didn’t rain in the test area”.
“And this morning, when we looked at the samples from yesterday morning at 5:30 a.m., they were very good, around 500-550,” colony-forming units per milliliter (CFU/ml) for the fecal bacteria E. coli, one of the two measured to authorize or not to allow swimming.
And “we had very good figures this morning” on instant samples, assured Marc Guillaume.
The cancellation on Sunday and Monday of two reconnaissance sessions of the swimming section and the last-minute postponement of the men’s race, initially scheduled for Tuesday morning, for “health reasons” have given the organizers cold sweats.
The bacteria levels found “in certain places” on the course were “still above acceptable limits”, they explained.
But on Wednesday, the organizers were finally able to give the green light for the first Olympic event in the Seine.
After heavy rains fell on Friday and Saturday in the French capital, the improvement in weather conditions since Sunday has led to an improvement in water quality.
The female triathletes set off first at 8 a.m. under the Alexandre-III bridge, followed by the men late in the morning.
Another race on Monday
The triathlon will therefore not be stripped of its swimming part and transformed into a duathlon (running, cycling, running), a last resort solution, extremely rare, which the main players did not want to hear about.
“I never doubted because I told myself that it would have been a shame for our sport,” commented Frenchwoman Cassandre Beaugrand, who had just been crowned Olympic champion.
The events planned in the river have been plaguing organizers for months. In August 2023, the swimming portion of the mixed relay of the triathlon test event of the Games was already canceled due to poor water quality.
With the images of the triathletes in the Seine who “are going to go around the world”, the prefect of the Île-de-France region Marc Guillaume and the mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo, who have been working for years on the Seine decontamination issue, were not shy about their pleasure near the event site.
“We’re there,” added Emmanuel Macron on X. “We have achieved in 4 years what was impossible for 100 years: the Seine is swimmable. A fabulous legacy for the people of the Paris region who will be able to swim there and for biodiversity,” added the president.
The State and the Paris region’s local authorities have invested a total of 1.4 billion euros to make the river and its main tributary, the Marne, swimmable, in preparation for the Olympic Games and for the general public afterwards.
“If these infrastructures had not been built, we would not have been able to swim this morning, because of the storms of the last few days,” stressed the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, who came to watch the triathlon events.
The saga of Olympic events in the Seine is far from over. A final triathlon event, the mixed relay, is due to take place on Monday 5 August, before the open water swimming events.
“We are obviously remaining focused” to “monitor the various indicators for the next events”, commented the spokesperson for the organising committee, Anne Descamps, who expressed her “satisfaction” and reported figures of between 488 and 770 CFU/ml for the faecal bacteria E. coli.
For its part, the Surfrider Foundation association was “concerned” that the athletes had “started” while “it rained for several hours before the start” during the night.