Even though awful water quality made it illegal to swim in the Seine for more than a century, the Olympics pushed forward to hold all of its events in the historic Parisian “river” as planned. However, the organizers who chose to go on with the four open-water events did so at the expense of athlete safety.
It is absolutely disgusting.
All kinds of trash and debris makes the Seine look absolutely disgusting. And that’s just on the surface.
Paris’ centuries-old infrastructure is unable to handle heavy rains. As a result, literal sewage leaks into the drainage basin. Feces carries bacteria, mainly E. coli, which seeps into the water.
France spent $1.5 billion to clean up the Seine for the Olympics but efforts largely failed. After months of controversy, and multiple canceled practices due to unsafe levels of bacteria, triathletes jumped into the poop water last week. Belgian Claire Michel was hospitalized with E. coli poisoning after the competition.
So clearly it wasn’t actually safe, even though it was labeled as such after testing!
Women’s swimmers were the next group of athletes to submerge themselves in the Seine on Thursday. They had the same issue as last week, where practices were canceled on account of high bacteria levels, which created its own set of problems.
Our first training session got canceled, and then the second time, we didn’t really want to spend too much time here, risking getting sick before the race. So I really didn’t get too much time in here before.
— Katie Grimes of the USA
Conditions were eventually ruled as “safe” for competition — but the participants say otherwise. They were equally as focused on not getting sick as they were winning. If not more so.
They don’t even want to know what was floating in the water…
It was really hard because we couldn’t really focus on the race. We had to care about the [water] quality, and what’s going to happen afterwards. We [had to] focus on not swallowing water and [being] safe in the race. I saw some brown things; I hope it’s not what I thought it was. I am concerned, but I brought some Hungarian palinka [fruit brandy] so I hope I’m not going to get sick after [the race].
— Bettina Fabian of Hungary
Italy’s Ginevra Taddeucci won the bronze medal in the women’s marathon swim. She might’ve won the whole thing if she could’ve given the actually competition the focus that it deserved!
Of course I’ve swum in better places. I was only caring about not feeling sick, but It was fine.
— Ginevra Taddeucci of Italy
Symptoms of E. coli poisoning typically shows up anywhere between two and five days after exposure. The clock is now ticking!