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.
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.”