Paris Olympics fiasco looms as Seine (still) unsafe for swimming

By Nicolas Camut | 07/30/2024 12:24 PM EDT

With the men’s triathlon postponed, the political dream of Olympic swimming in the Seine could go down the drain — literally.

The infrastructure on the venue of the swimming portion of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games triathlon, next to the Alexandre III bridge.

The Seine river in Paris has been found to be still unsafe for Olympic athletes to swim in Tuesday. Thibaud Moritz/AFP via Getty Images

PARIS — On Tuesday morning, athletes should have been thrashing down the river Seine in Paris, battling to come out on top of the Olympic triathlon’s first leg: 1,500 meters of open water swimming.

Instead, not a single swimmer was in sight.

The reason? Once again, the Seine was too polluted to swim in.

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In a press release published at 5 a.m., just three hours before the race, World Triathlon announced the men’s trial was postponed to Wednesday for “health reasons,” after water testing “revealed water quality levels that did not provide sufficient guarantees to allow the event to be held.”

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