For hundreds of years, the Seine River has inspired artists, served as the backdrop for scenic romantic strolls, and provided a thoroughfare along some of the most familiar Paris landmarks, such as the Eiffel Tower and Notre-Dame. But it’s not a waterway that invites people to swim; in fact, swimming in the Seine has been banned since 1923 due to river traffic and pollution.
The City of Light has been hoping to change that. For years, it’s been working to clean up the Seine. The goal was to unveil the famous waterway’s transformation on one of the world’s most prominent stages: the forthcoming Paris 2024 Summer Olympics.
If resuscitated, the Seine would be part of the Games’ opening ceremony, which, for the first time, will take place outside of a stadium: A flotilla of boats will parade athletes through the capital along the famous waterway. The Seine will also serve as the venue for some swimming competitions: two long-distance races (on August 8 and 9) and the water portion of the triathlon (spanning from July 30 to August 5). After, the city hopes to keep the river clean enough that locals and visitors can continue to swim in it.
However, with less than a month before the start of the Games, it’s looking increasingly unlikely that the waterway will be clean enough for athletes to swim in. According to a June 21 report published by the Paris region and Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s office, recent tests show the water is still at dangerous contamination levels (more than 10 times the maximum threshold set by the World Triathlon Federation) for E. coli, which can cause diarrhea, urinary tract infections, pneumonia, and sepsis when ingested.
The report blamed heavy rain and cool temperatures as part of the reason the water quality isn’t up to snuff.
As of publishing, the Olympic organizers have yet to share information about whether there’s a backup venue. Team USA open-water coach Ron Aitken told USA Today he suspects organizers aren’t keen on sharing what Plan B is because of the hype surrounding swimming in the Seine.
“I don’t think the Paris group wants people knowing that there’s a backup plan because there would be everybody saying, ‘Forget it. None of us are going to do this now because we know you’ve got an option,’” Aitken said. “I think they want you to think there’s no option, especially if they think they’ve got it under control and it’s going to be safe.”
Still, if there isn’t an alternate plan, removing the bacteria is critical for the triathlon and swim marathons to happen. That effort could be made harder if Parisians angry about the strain of the Games on public transportation, security, and more of the city’s resources go through with protest plans, which include defecating in the famed river.
The cleanup was a key part of Paris’s bid to host the 2024 Olympics. And while the recovery of the river’s water quality has been accelerated by the international sporting event, providing a clear timeline for improving the ecological and environmental quality of the Seine and its tributaries, efforts to revive the river have been underway, to a certain degree, for decades. In 1990, for example, Jacques Chirac (then mayor of Paris and later president) swore he would swim in the river within three years to prove that it had been cleaned, a vow that never materialized.
To achieve the aspiration in time for the Games, Paris has been looking less toward purifying the waterway and more toward keeping untreated water from entering the river in the first place. To do that, the city has installed a series of new underground pipes, freshwater tanks, and pumps, with the goal of keeping harmful bacteria, like E. coli and enterococci, out of the river. Authorities have also improved sewage treatment plants along the river and its tributaries and replumbed upstream homes whose wastewater had been flowing into the river. The city has also created storage facilities, such as the “giant hole [next to Paris’s Austerlitz train station] that will hold the equivalent of 20 Olympic swimming pools of dirty water that will now be treated rather than being spat raw through storm drains in the river,” according to the Associated Press. It’s an undertaking that’s been given a budget of $1.53 billion.
In June 2023, it looked like the mission would be successful. While at one point only three species of fish were left in the Seine, Solene Bures, a spokesperson for the City of Paris, told Afar last summer that there are now 30 species of fish in Paris, which she argues illustrates how far the city has come. She added that had the Olympic and Paralympic Games been held in the summer of 2022, the water would have been safe enough for swimming 90 percent of the time.
Weather, however, was always going to be the wild card. Should the city see a storm in the days leading up to the competition, the runoff could degrade the water quality. In that case, Olympic officials would have to postpone the races that are scheduled to be held in the Seine until the waterway passes quality tests.
In 2025, Paris city officials hope to open permanent swimming areas at four locations along the river in the city center. (Other swimming areas may open later at other spots along the Seine, according to the city.) According to Bures, it’s too soon to say what those areas will look like.
And while the Olympics aren’t historically known for having a positive environmental impact (often the stadiums constructed in host cities go unused after the games—such as Beijing’s famous “Bird’s Nest,” which cost $460 million to construct and $10 million a year to maintain but sits largely empty—having a clean Seine is an encouraging legacy. It’ll also act as a case study for other large cities keen on improving their waterways, such as Berlin’s Spree River and Boston’s Charles River.
As Dan Angelescu, a scientist who is tracking the Seine’s water quality for Paris, told the Associated Press, “It will create waves, so to speak, across the world because a lot of cities are watching Paris.”
This story was originally published in June 2023 and was updated on July 9, 2024, to include current information.
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