The French freestyle swimming team canceled its training planned at the competition site on Monday this Friday, June 7, due to the poor results of water quality tests.
We no longer count the missed appointments. According to the sports department of Radio France, the French open water swimming team had to cancel its training scheduled for Monday June 10 at the 2024 Olympic competition site. The cause was excessively strong currents and a deterioration of the water quality due to heavy rains in May.
Cleaning the Seine to allow triathlon and freestyle swimming events to take place there is one of the big bets of the organizers of the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. But the project is subject to so many hazards that it continues to suffer setbacks. On August 6, 2023, the open water swimming World Cup round scheduled at the site is canceled. on August 17, the women’s and men’s triathlon events were able to take place in the river, without a hitch. But on August 19 and 20, patatras, paratriathlon and triathlon events in mixed relay were adapted into a duathlon format, namely only cycling and running, due to a too high concentration of intestinal bacteria Escherichia coli (E. coli).
Concrete Cathedral
“The Seine is not made for swimming.” At the beginning of March 2024, the Olympic 10 km open water champion, Ana Marcela Cunha, threw a stone into the river, demanding a “plan B” for the open water and triathlon events. The NGO Surfrider Foundation’s measurement campaign in April, 100 days before the official events, will give it one more argument. Concentrations regularly higher than 2,000 colony forming units (cfu)/100 ml for E. coli and 500 cfu/100 ml for enterococci, are observed, well above the international standards for competition set at 1000 cfu/100 ml respectively. 100 ml and 400 cfu/100 ml.
However, the organizers appeared with complete serenity in May, during the inauguration of the Austerlitz “storm basin”, the centerpiece of the system intended to make the Seine suitable for swimming from the month of July for the Olympic competitions. triathlon and freestyle swimming. Concretely, a 50,000 m³ reservoir was built for 100 million euros with the aim of absorbing water in the event of torrential rain. Indeed, the main problem of the Seine is the saturation of the sewers in the event of severe weather. Concretely, the rain causes the sewers to overflow and dumps, without treatment, dirty water into the river. Thanks to this concrete cathedral linked to a network of interceptor tunnels, the organizers hope to capture excess water and prevent the pipes from overflowing. Next up, the often mentioned, but never materialized, baths of Anne Hidalgo and Emmanuel Macron, in the river.
