It wasn’t until the 1960s that the river’s restoration began to attract political attention, first with the creation of the French water agency and later with a promise from then-Paris mayor (later prime minister) Jacques Chirac. “I will bathe in the Seine in front of witnesses to prove that the Seine has become a clean river,” he declared in 1988, vowing to complete the feat by the early 1990s. Chirac, who died in 2019, never took the plunge in public. But his idea would live on in French politics, and the Olympics created a new deadline for completing the cleanup.
Macron reiterated his promise: “I will do it,” he told reporters. in Marchrefusing to be given a date. However, both he and Hidalgo were knocked into the water by Sports Minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, who dove into the Seine with a ungainly failure on Saturday. His office did not respond to WIRED’s questions about whether he felt OK after the swim.
Without the promise of swimming in the Seine, what Parisians will get out of the $1.5 billion cleanup operation is not immediately obvious. In reality, it is not possible. clean The river, on the other hand, is focused on preventing new untreated sewage from entering. The city has taken strong measures against Flouting houses and apartments with dubious plumbing, which had been pouring sewage directly into the Seine. Authorities then began tackling the problem caused by intense storms, which cause water to flow from the street into the city’s drains, increasing the amount of liquid in the underlying sewers. Too much rain means the city has a choice: either let raw sewage back up through people’s toilets and flood bathrooms across the capital, or dump untreated waste into the river to make room, no matter the consequences.
To prevent this from happening, Paris built a giant storage tank near the Austerlitz metro station, capable of holding the dirty water from 20 Olympic-sized swimming pools. “The idea is that it will act as a buffer, so that when it rains a lot, instead of the sewer system immediately overflowing, we have a pond that fills up,” explains Dan Angelescu, founder and CEO of Fluidion, a company that tracks E. coli levels in the Seine and had worked with the city on the cleanup project until last year. The pond created a “drastic” improvement in water quality during small amounts of rain, Angelescu says, but even so a storm last week caused E. coli levels to peak at 1,000 E. coli per 100 milliliters, considered safe for the Olympics. “Everything has a limit,” Angelescu says when asked about the pond’s effectiveness.
Heavy rains in recent days have created lingering uncertainty about whether the Seine will be ready in time for the Games and, if it is, whether swimmers will be able to wade into the water without getting dizzy. Hidalgo may have already taken the plunge, but the real guinea pigs will be the Olympic athletes registered to take part in the open water and triathlon events scheduled for the Seine, provided that water tests come back positive.
Among them is a slightly nervous Daniel Wiffen, a world record holder who will be competing in the Seine representing Ireland. Paris will be the first “big race” in open water for the 23-year-old, and he is concerned about the water quality. “It’s a big problem,” he says. Ideally, he would like to do a test on the Seine to better understand the currents, and he has been asking other athletes if they think it is worth the risk. “Do you risk going into the Seine two days before the race and getting sick the day before the race?” he asks.
However, he still has hopes that the race will go ahead. The idea of swimming in the iconic Parisian river inspired him to sign up. “I want to swim next to the Eiffel Tower,” he told WIRED. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
