By Emma Kemp
The Seine is many things. A river stretching almost 800km through northern France. A UNESCO World Heritage site immortalised in art and literature. The home of Joan of Arc’s ashes and half of Paris’ trash. The place of a planned mass poo protest.
The world’s eyes will be on France’s capital on July 26 when, for the first time in Olympics history, the opening ceremony will be taken out of a stadium and turned into a river parade. But the real controversy surrounding the Seine’s role in the Games comes later in the program, when triathletes and marathon swimmers are due to plunge into murky green-brown water too toxic for most fish to survive.
So how has a river carrying so much harmful bacteria that swimming in it has been illegal for a century become an official swimming venue at the 2024 Olympics? And is it clean enough for the events to go ahead?
Has the Seine always been dirty?
Pretty much. Paris runs off a 19th-century “single system” drainage infrastructure, which combines household waste water from kitchens and toilets with run-off from rain on the street. This is supposed to flow through a network of tunnels under the streets to treatment centres on the outskirts of the city. Except when there is heavy rain, at which point the overflow is drained into the Seine. That looks like sewage gushing from 40 portholes along the river’s paved banks.
When Paris first hosted the Olympics in 1900, it held swimming events in the river. But it banned public swimming in Seine in 1923 - the year before the Games returned. Even then, locals continued to illegally dive off the Pont d’Iena during the summer, but gradually ceased as the pollution became worse. By the 1990s, the section running through Paris was recorded as containing one of the highest levels of heavy metals in the world.
River SeineCredit: Getty/Bethany Rae
In 1990, Paris mayor (who later became president) Jacques Chirac publicly pledged to “swim in the Seine in front of witnesses to prove that the Seine is a clean river”. He never did.
What has been done to clean it up?
It was called the ‘Swimming Plan’, and the state-backed scheme worth a reported €1.4 billion ($AU2.3bn) is one of the longest-running, most expensive and high-stakes endeavours of the Games, the deadline for which has supercharged a clean-up that was decades in the making. The aim is to make the Seine clean enough for 2024 Olympians and, in 2025, citizens. The process has involved thousands of new underground pipes, tanks and pumps designed to update the antiquated system and stop all that harmful bacteria flowing into the river.
Chief among them is a 700-metre tunnel that connect to an enormous underground storage tank near the Austerlitz train station. Together, they are designed to hold enough water to fill 20 Olympic pools that can be treated rather than simply spat raw through drains and into the river.
Officials have also been going door to door in suburban areas of Paris trying to persuade some 20,000 homeowners to let workers dig up their pipes and reconnect them to properly to the sewage system. Houseboats on the Seine have also been targeted and given a time limit to connect moored boats to the network.
Has it worked?
Negative. At least not to standards required by Olympic authorities, let alone Europe’s more stringent Bathing Water Directive.
The River Seine is still failing water quality tests, one month before it is scheduled to host open-water events and the swimming leg of the triathlon.Credit: AP
Last year, World Aquatics cancelled the Open Water Swimming World Cup in Paris after officials determined the Seine’s water quality “remained below acceptable standards for safeguarding swimmers’ health”. The global governing body added it was “clear that further work” was needed to “ensure robust contingency plans are in place” for the Olympics.
The latest tests, completed last week and released by the Paris mayor’s office on Friday, showed levels of E.coli bacteria – an indicator of faecal matter – far above the upper limits imposed by international sports federations. This followed a period of heavy rainfall. At the planned triathlon swimming site, the Alexandre III bridge, E.coli was present at 10 times above acceptable levels. At no point did it fall below the upper limit of 1000 colony-forming units per 100 millilitres (cfu/ml) used by the World Triathlon Federation. The readings for enterococci bacteria were better, but still at unsafe levels for several days last week.
What have the politicians said?
Lots of politician things. Notably, France President Emmanuel Macron and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo promised to personally take a dip in the Seine to prove its cleanliness. Macron, upon being asked by local journalists, grinned and said: “I will do it, but I won’t give you the date, or you risk being there.”
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo and France President Emmanuel Macron both pledged to take a dip in the Seine before the Olympics.Credit: AFP
Hidalgo scheduled her swim for June 23 but pulled the pin at the last minute, citing weather and “political reasons”, in a likely nod to the upcoming election, but still insisted “it’s ready”. “It is not possible to organise the jump to the river during the election,” Hidalgo said. “And now we are with a new date for this very great moment before the opening ceremony, because I want to swim in the River Seine before the opening ceremony.”
How have the locals reacted?
In true Parisian fashion. Always good for a creative protest (see recent efforts by farmers who showered government offices with manure), residents began an online campaign to stage a “poop protest” or “shit flash mob” by defecating en masse to fill the river with human faeces on the day Macron and Hidalgo take to the water. A hashtag which translates to “I shit in the Seine on June 23” soon went viral and spawned memes of AI-generated pictures of toilets along the Seine, and even Macron standing on a bridge covered in faeces.
A website was even created, cleverly utilising the poop emoji and tagline: “Because after putting us in shit it’s up to them to bathe in our shit.” It also featured a handy tool to help people calculate exactly what time they would need to empty their bowels into the river based on their distance away from Paris so that their soil arrived on time to meet the pair.
Parisians are angry over the huge amount France has spent on cleaning up the river, along with other Games-related issues such as pressure on the public transport system, security risks and the rise of the far-right National Rally party. The latter prompted Macron to call a snap parliamentary election.
What about the athletes?
Brazilian Ana Marcela Cunha, who won Tokyo 2020 gold in the women’s marathon 10km swim, recently expressed “concern” about the pollution and said Olympic officials “need a plan B in case it’s not possible to swim in the Seine, because the river is “not made for swimming”.
Last month, Australia’s Chef de Mission Anna Meares said she had faith in the assurances of the Games organisers but would not force athletes to participate if tests showed the water was not safe.“It’s not a point of us stepping in to say ‘we will not let you swim’. Ultimately it’s the choice of the athlete,” Meares said.
Team medical director Dr Carolyn Broderick said the Australian Olympic Committee had experience of protecting athletes from potential infection after similar concerns about the open water swimming venues at the 2016 Rio Games. Her medical team will apply antibacterial solutions to the eyes and skin of athletes after they had been in the water and offer them prophylactic drugs to prevent gut infections.
“I think if the Paris Organising Committee say it’s safe to swim, I don’t have grave concerns,” Broderick said. “We are certainly aware that the water quality differs considerably based on what’s happening outside, particularly rainfall. So we need to prepare them for the possible pathogens that might be in there. And we’ve got a system in place to do that.”
Could Olympic events be cancelled?
Organisers have made clear that there is no Plan B if the water quality does not meet European safety standards during the two weeks of the Games. And while Paris 2024 boss Tony Estanguet was “confident that it will be possible to use the Seine”, he has forewarned “rainy conditions” could force a postponement of the marathon swimming (August 8-9) and triathlon (July 30-31 and August 5). The International Olympic Committee also said in April that the triathlon could be turned into a duathlon - just running and cycling - if the river’s water is too polluted.
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