Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo on Wednesday kept her promise to bathe in the River Seine to show that its waters are clean ahead of the Olympic Games’ outdoor swimming events, which begin on July 26 in the French capital. “It was cold, but not too cold,” she said afterwards.
Hidalgo entered the waters of the Seine without diving in, dressed in a black and orange neoprene swimsuit and swimming goggles, flanked by the president of the organising committee for the Olympics in the French capital, Tony Estanguet, who also did a few strokes, the prefect of the Paris region, Ile-de-France, Marc Guillaume, and the Paris councillor for sport, Pierre Rabadan. The scene took place before the eyes of hundreds of curious onlookers who watched from the shore. Last Saturday, the French Minister of Sport, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, already bathed in the waterway that runs through Paris.
“Without the Games, we wouldn’t have done it,” Hidalgo admitted after swimming a hundred metres, before highlighting that, after four years of rehabilitation and cleaning works, the river is ready for events such as the freestyle triathlon competition, which will take place on the Seine in the section that will be swum.
In January, the mayor of Paris had promised to bathe in the Seine, whose waters had been off-limits to bathers for a century.
These symbolic baths are intended to dispel the controversy, nine days before the opening of the Games, over the alleged poor quality of the waters of the Seine, whose murky appearance, attributed to recent rains, had sparked speculation about the impossibility of holding the outdoor swimming events of the Games in them.
After the water failed to meet minimum quality standards on several occasions, the French capital’s city council reported last Friday that the Seine had exceeded these health levels for 10 of the last 12 days, so there was no cause for concern ahead of the 2024 Paris Olympics.
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Opening ceremony
The quality and appearance of the Seine’s waters are not only a cause for concern because some of the sporting events may have to be cancelled or postponed. They are also concerned because the opening ceremony of the XXXIII Olympiad includes a six-kilometre race by athletes along the river, the first time such an event has been organised outside an Olympic stadium.
More than 10,000 athletes from 206 countries, half of them women – also for the first time at the Games – will take part in the traditional opening parade of the competition on a hundred boats that will follow the course of the water from east to west, between the Austerlitz and Iena bridges. Eighty giant television screens will be set up on the banks of the river so that some 300,000 people can watch the ceremony, the majority, some 200,000, without paying an entrance fee. The ceremony, which will have the Seine as its co-star, will be attended by some 120 heads of state or government and it is estimated that one billion people will follow the spectacle on television.
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