After months of speculation about whether the River Seine would be clean enough for Olympic athletes to compete in it, officials deemed the water safe for swimming following a last-minute test.
The favorable test of the river’s water quality on Wednesday morning Paris time means the men and women will swim in back-to-back races as part of the triathlon event, beginning at 8 a.m. local time. The men’s race had originally been scheduled for Tuesday but got postponed after the Seine failed water quality tests.
“The results of the latest water analyses, received at 3:20 a.m., have been assessed as compliant by World Triathlon allowing for the triathlon competitions to take place,” said a news release from Paris organizers and World Triathlon, the sport’s governing body.
Water quality on the Seine became something of a saga leading up to the Games, as organizers raced to prepare the polluted waterway for prime-time attention. For months, the French have been testing river samples for E. Coli and enterococci bacteria, which are indicators of fecal matter, as well as other pathogens. When E.Coli levels are high, swimmers risk developing gastrointestinal illness.
The Seine had been failing those tests after rainy weather, since storms can send runoff, and sometimes sewage, into the river.
Swimming had been disallowed on the Seine for more than a century because it was too polluted, but the city of Paris led a $1.5 billion effort to clean up the river and shore up waste treatment systems in the lead-up to the Olympics.
As the first events approached, organizers had hoped for clear, sunny weather to reduce overall pollution and allow ultraviolet light to inactivate some bacteria.
But the weather has rarely cooperated.
Last year, some test events to rehearse the triathlon had to be canceled because of water quality concerns after rainfall.
Then the opening ceremony, which involved a boat parade on the Seine, took place amid some downpours on Friday, and the showers lasted into Saturday.
That rainfall caused pollution and forced organizers to cancel two days of swim training on Sunday and Monday. Then they postponed the men’s triathlon, which was originally slated for Tuesday morning.
“I’m just trying to focus on what I can control,” Kirsten Kasper, an American triathlete, told NBC News on Tuesday. “We swim in a lot of city locations, and it’s common for water quality to be a question. But I just have to trust that the race organizers are doing the testing and what they need to do to make sure it’s safe.”
Water quality experts said the difficulties in ensuring that the Seine was sufficiently clean could draw needed attention to broader issues of environmental contamination, which are common worldwide.
“It’s just very hard to manage, in large cities, the amount of human waste that we see,” said Katy Graham, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering. “The public thinks a lot of these issues have been completely solved. They’re most certainly not.”
NBC News is a division of NBCUniversal, which owns the U.S. media rights to the Olympic Games through 2032, including the 2024 Paris Games, which begin on July 26.
