The fact that you can safely swim in the Seine on a good day now is unbelievable. Record rains at the beginning of the Olympics probably didn’t do them any favours though.
I really hope they pull it off. It would be an incredible achievement. If they end up having to cut swimming on the other hand…
The fact that it took the Olympics for the government to care about how dirty the Seine is is insulting and shows how little they care about the environment and their own citizens.
Anne Hidalgo has been mayor of Paris since 2014. She has made huge efforts towards making Paris greener, from bike lanes all over the city to new green lungs. It has been the centre of her political agenda for a decade.
Cleaning up a river like the Seine enough to make it possible to swim in it is not something one can do as a minor preparation for the Olympics. It takes years and years of profound changes throughout the city.
I find it more insulting when people don’t care enough about the environment or people to check the facts before making their hot takes.
That’s the mayor, I’m talking about the government. It became so important for Macron all of the sudden because of the Olympics when he couldn’t have cared less otherwise. That’s a project that should have been taken care of decades ago.
I think giving Macron credit for the cleaning of the Seine is misplaced, as much as he would probably appreciate it.
50% of the budget (700m €) came from the government and the cleanup was managed by l’Agence de l’eau Seine-Normandie, not the city of Paris.
As an amateur triathlete, cutting the swimming is my dream! My best Olympic-distance triathlon* was the time they announced the night before that due to rough waves (in the beach swim), they would be cutting the swim from 1,500 m to 750 m, and adding a 1.5 km beach run before T1. Also, as an added bonus, despite the weather the night before being really rough, it was smooth as glass the morning of the race.
But that’s an amateur race. Certainly, at the professional level, if they have to make it a duathlon, that’ll be very unfortunate for the competition. It’s not the event they were training for, and it’s so different at an elite level.
* technically not my fastest. I had one faster, but that was with a swim that was over 300 m short and downstream in a river, and the run was 400 m short according to my GPS, with no added distance like the above-mentioned beach run
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