There will be no “familiarization” of the triathletes with the Seine before the individual events: the rains that fell on Friday and Saturday in Paris have soiled the Seine and forced the organizers of the Olympic Games to cancel the second training session planned for Monday morning in the river, after that of Sunday.
But the organisers remain “confident” that the events will take place on Tuesday and Wednesday, they said on the night of Sunday to Monday.
After a meeting with the Olympic Organising Committee (OCOG), local authorities and Météo-France, the International Triathlon Federation took the “decision to cancel the swimming part of the triathlon familiarisation” scheduled for Monday morning, as it had the day before, because the “water quality levels […] do not provide sufficient guarantees,” Paris 2024 and World Triathlon said in a press release.
This “is due to the rains that fell on Paris” on Friday, during the opening ceremony, and on Saturday, they said.
They did not specify the level of E.Coli and enterococci bacteria, which must be below a certain threshold, but recalled that “the priority is the health of the athletes.”
Decisions on whether or not athletes are allowed to swim in the river are made the night before the event based on a number of factors, including water quality tests carried out the day before, which take 24 hours to deliver their verdict.
“Recovery” on Tuesday, according to Anne Hidalgo
If the water quality is insufficient on D-1, the organizers have planned “contingency days” to postpone the events.
The triathlon is the first Olympic discipline to be held in the Seine, before open water swimming in the second week of the Paris Olympics.
The men’s individual triathlon event is scheduled to begin at 8 a.m. Tuesday, followed by the women’s individual event at the same time Wednesday.
This will therefore be without prior reconnaissance of the swimming route in the river, starting from the Pont Alexandre-III. And this, while the flow of the Seine, swollen by the rains of recent weeks, is three times higher than a usual summer level (more than 400 m3 / second Monday morning, compared to 100 to 150 normally).
The mixed relay is scheduled for August 5.
Organizers are “confident that water quality will return to below limits before the start of triathlon competitions on July 30,” Tuesday, “given the weather forecast for the next 36 hours.”
“Tomorrow, things will be back to normal,” assured Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo on France Bleu Paris, recalling that “the rain we had on Friday was exceptional.”
However, beware of thunderstorms ahead of Wednesday’s event.
“We are forecasting storms tomorrow evening that will move up from the Centre-Val-de-Loire towards the Paris region,” one of Météo France’s forecasters, Christophe Calas, told a few journalists on Monday from the COJO headquarters.
“There are still many uncertainties about their trajectories, their intensity, we can’t say anything yet,” he said. But “if a storm passes over Paris tomorrow evening and it gives significant amounts of precipitation, it will impact the quality of the water in the Seine,” he explained.
A source at the Hôtel de Ville said that the results of Sunday’s water analyses were moving “in the right direction” compared to those of Saturday. She expressed confidence that male triathletes would be able to swim in the Seine as early as Tuesday.
It is the moment of truth for the organizers of the Paris Olympic Games: the State and the Paris region’s local authorities have invested 1.4 billion euros to make the Seine and its main tributary, the Marne, swimmable for the Olympic Games and then for the general public.
“It is because there are all these investments that the situation is being restored very quickly,” Anne Hidalgo said on France Bleu.
Due to heavy rains, the water in the Seine had been of poor quality for much of June, but it has since improved: water quality analyses were recently within health standards six days out of seven from July 17 to 23.