Triathletes Are Lab Rats for the Seine Cleanup Stunt

By David Fickling

What’s not to like about a sparkling bathing spot in the middle of a global city?

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s €1.4 billion ($1.5 billion) bet to clean up the Seine in time for the Olympic triathlon this week hasn’t paid out. The men’s event was postponed on Tuesday due to excessive pollution. If it goes ahead as planned on Wednesday alongside the women’s contest, however, the French capital will have demonstrated that after a century in which swimming in the city was banned, it’s finally safe for freestyle.

Well, up to a point. It’s admirable to improve a great city’s water quality, but pinning this entire campaign on a single Olympic event has been an entirely foreseeable act of hubris. Urban rivers are some of the most unruly features of our environment, and don’t meekly submit to calendar schedules or political will. By promising a race in the Seine on a specified date at the mercy of rain and river conditions, Hidalgo and the Games’ organizers have turned elite athletes into guinea pigs for the sake of a photo opportunity.

It’s a lovely idea that the rivers flowing through our mighty cities might one day return to their once-pristine conditions. But it’s a fantasy. From the first bridges built before the Romans, joining the Parisii’s island capital to land, through the limestone quais that confined the stream between steep banks in the 19th century, right up to the artificial Paris-Plages beaches built in recent decades by dumping sand along the waterfront, the Seine has long been a thoroughly engineered place.

That means every decision made about it is a bargain between nature and the construction industry. Perhaps the upgraded sewage treatment plants and 50,000 cubic-meter overflow basin to stop storm water pumping effluent into the river system could have been built to yet higher standards. Then, maybe, Tuesday’s triathlon might have gone to schedule. But I doubt it.

That’s because overflowing sewers are only part of the problem for urban swimmers. Plenty of runoff goes direct from roads and pavements into the water. In a metropolitan area with 2.1 million cats and dogs, plus an estimated 3.8 million rats in the city center alone, you don’t need a single drop to overflow from the sewer system to provide more than enough fecal matter to lift pollution beyond acceptable levels. 

I’m an amateur triathlete — and living in Sydney, most weeks I swim a few kilometers in some of the world’s most beautiful urban open-water spots. Even so, I wouldn’t dream of taking a dip at Bondi Beach after heavy rain like Paris has seen over the past week. A website run by my state government monitors water quality and warns me to wait several days after a downpour before venturing into the ocean. At spots on Sydney Harbour, less easily flushed clean by the ebb and flow of the tides, I’m extra cautious. Paris is even worse off: Hundreds of kilometers from the sea, it has no tidal turnover at all.

France, furthermore, already has one of the world’s most iconic locations for this event. A couple of hour’s drive along the coast from the Olympics sailing center in Marseille, Nice held Europe’s first major international triathlon contest in 1982. Alongside Kona in Hawaii, it’s one of two locations hosting world championships for Ironman, the prestigious contest owned by New York’s billionaire Newhouse media dynasty. Athletes there would have swum in the pristine waters of the Mediterranean and cycled up the vertiginous roads of the Alpes-Maritimes, made famous by the Tour de France.

Hidalgo is right to spend money cleaning up the Seine, even if most of the city’s 12 million people have better places to go for open-water swimming. London, whose mismanaged utility Thames Water dumps tens of billions of liters of raw sewage into the river even as it buckles under a £16.5 billion ($21 billion) debt load, could learn from that vision. If Parisians in future can swim there any time it hasn’t rained in two days (the target of the current plan), she will have revitalized a precious and beloved public asset.

Her mistake was to tie all this to an event dependent on the vagaries of the weather, with all the world’s media watching. Far from cementing an idea in the public mind that Paris is an ideal bathing spot, Hidalgo has only reminded people that with each dip we roll the dice on an E. coli or norovirus infection.

It’s touching that we should want our urban rivers to return to a state of nature. It’s a futile dream, though. The paradises we build in our cities will always be fallen ones. Politicians and event organizers would do well to remember that.