Anne Hidalgo’s wetsuit for swimming in the Seine enters the museum

This swimwear will go down in posterity. The wetsuit that Anne Hidalgo wore during her swim in the Seine for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games will enter the museum. The mayor of Paris said “very honored” by handing it over to the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland, this Wednesday. Evoking a “separate memory”, who marks “the culmination of so many years of work”, the councilor said to himself “proud” that this object “can symbolically integrate the collections” from the museum, she wrote on her Instagram account.

On July 17, nine days before the opening of the Olympic Games, the mayor of Paris wanted to prove that she had kept her promise to make the Seine swimmable, by diving into the waters of the river in the company of Tony Estanguet, the president. from the organizing committee of the Olympic Games, Marc Guillaume, the prefect of Île-de-France and Pierre Rabadan, deputy for sports at the City.

Retaining the black and orange jumpsuit she wore then is a gesture that “is not insignificant since it was the Games which allowed our river, a true green lung, to be swimmable again”recalled Anne Hidalgo on Wednesday. Over the last eight years, the State and communities have invested 1.4 billion euros, in particular to reduce as much as possible the bacteriological contamination of the river during rainy weather.

“It’s a testament to what the Games can leave as a legacy,” she declared. Between the sneakers of a handball champion and the paddle of a kayaker, the curious will be able to admire the swimwear of the mayor of Lausanne, in this museum dedicated to the history of the Olympic Games since its inauguration in 1993 .