According to official analysis results published by the news website “Mediapart”, the quality of the river water was sufficient for Olympic swimming only 20% of the time since the start of the Games.
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“We have achieved in four years what has been impossible for a hundred years: the Seine is swimmable.” On Wednesday July 31, the Olympic triathlon events could finally take place, after an initial postponement caused by pollution of the Parisian river, and Emmanuel Macron gargled about it on the social network XThe bet on swimmability, which is supposed to benefit the “general public” from 2025, still seems far from being won, despite the approximately 1.4 billion euros of public money invested by the authorities. This is what the results of the daily samples taken by the Eau de Paris teams reveal, which the news site Mediapart publishes in fullthis Wednesday, August 7. According to this data, the quality of the Seine was sufficient for Olympic swimming only 20% of the time since the start of the Olympics on July 26, and even 10% if we apply the criteria required for “general public” swimming.
Thus, over a ten-day period from July 27 to August 5, the results exceeded the thresholds set by the International Triathlon Federation for contamination by Escherichia coli (E. coli) or intestinal enterococci every day, with the exception of July 30 and July 31. Including, therefore, August 5, the date on which the mixed triathlon relay was nevertheless held. On the other hand, many training sessions had to be cancelled due to water pollution, which exasperated the athletes. Several of them publicly testified to their annoyance with the organisation of the competition. Escherichia coli and intestinal enterococci are bacteria that reside mainly in the human digestive tract and can cause abdominal pain, diarrhoea, vomiting or even fever.
Two more trials in the Seine
Beyond the poor quality of the water, which can be explained in particular by the state of the sanitation networks upstream of the capital, by leaks in the Parisian sewers and by rainy weather, which encourages the discharge of dirty water, Mediapart deplores the “opacity” of the data communicated by the authorities in terms of pollution. Last weekend, Libé already noted that the weekly publication of a “bulletin on the quality of the water of the Seine” by the prefecture of Ile-de-France and the city of Paris had been interrupted at the start of the Olympic Games. Because it is the Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (Cojop) which now controls (and locks down) the communication around these figures.
The latter, questioned by Mediapart, “contests our interpretation of the analysis results on a single point: the day of August 5, the day of the mixed triathlon relay. On that date, the Eau de Paris teams measured 436 colony-forming units (CFU) per 100 milliliters (ml) of enterococci at one of the four sampling points, that of the port of Gros-Caillou”. According to the Cojop, this result “flirts with the limit” (set at 400 CFU / 100 ml by the international federation) and “is located outside the triathlon course”. Two Olympic events must still be held in the Seine: the women’s ten-kilometer open water race on Thursday, and the men’s race on Friday.
