‘It didn’t taste great.’ Olympic swimming in the Seine finally happens.
PARIS : France spent $1.5 billion to turn the Seine, the famously filthy river that flows through the heart of Paris, into a body of water that human beings could enter without contracting illness. Olympic organizers envisioned a postcard scene, with athletes swimming in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower and the golden dome of Les Invalides. Now, after years of debate, countless E.
coli tests, and one major event postponed, the reviews are finally in. “It didn’t taste great," Ainsley Thorpe of New Zealand said. “It’s a little bit brown." At around 8 a.m.
in Paris on Wednesday, 55 women dove into the Seine, battling murky waters and vicious currents for 1,500 meters, before returning to dry land to continue the triathlon. The good news: Nobody vomited or encountered anything too unsavory in the river—so far, at least. The men followed at 10:45 a.m., roughly 27 hours later than planned.
France’s Cassandre Beaugrand and Great Britain’s Alex Yee wound up winning gold medals. As of early Wednesday morning, nobody knew for certain whether the triathlon would even take place. The men’s competition was initially scheduled for Tuesday, but officials pulled the plug because of unacceptably high levels of bacteria.
Heavy rain had fallen onto the French capital over the weekend, resulting in sewage flowing straight into the Seine. That represented a nightmare scenario for organizers, who long insisted that their audacious idea to have athletes swim in the Seine wouldn’t only work, but would create one of the signature moments of these Olympics. There was no backup plan for the triathlon.
If the situation didn’t improve Wednesday, there was a chance the event would become a duathlon. It wasn’t until raceday at 4 a.m. that the
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