This photograph shows infrastructure on the venue of the swimming portion of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games triathlon, next to the Alexandre III bridge, on July 30, 2024. The Paris Olympics men's triathlon was postponed just hours before it was due to get under way on July 30 after water quality tests on the River Seine revealed it was still too dirty for swimming, organisers said. (Photo by Thibaud MORITZ / AFP) (Photo by THIBAUD MORITZ/AFP via Getty Images)THIBAUD MORITZ/Getty Images
The worst fears that organizers of the Paris Olympics had about holding swimming events in the Seine have been realized, with officials forced to postpone the men’s triathlon Tuesday and saying they still aren’t sure if the swimming leg of the competition will go ahead.
The men’s race was supposed to take place at 8 a.m. local time but was cancelled just four hours before the athletes were set to plunge into the river for the 1,500-metre swim. Officials said testing showed that the level of E. coli bacteria was above the allowable limit.
The race has been rescheduled for Wednesday morning to coincide with the women’s event, which will take place first. But officials aren’t sure if either race will happen, and the athletes won’t know until a few hours before the start.
Both events could be postponed again, or the swimming legs could be dropped – the races turned into duathlons, with only cycling and running. Officials already had to cancel two days of training in the Seine on Sunday and Monday because of pollution.
“We are all disappointed because we are not able to follow strictly what was planned,” said Marisol Casado, the president of World Triathlon, the sport’s governing body. “But the situation at this point, we are quite confident that it will happen tomorrow and we will be very happy, all of us.”
The water quality of the Seine has been an issue for months, and officials have been at pains to demonstrate that the river will be clean enough not only for the triathlon but the marathon swimming event next week as well. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo took a highly publicized swim earlier this month, and the city remains determined to open three sites along the river for public swimming next summer.
French authorities have invested €1.4-billion ($2.1-billion) on a variety of clean-up initiatives. One of the biggest is a new rainwater-retention basin that’s capable of collecting 50,000 cubic metres of water, the equivalent of roughly 20 Olympic-sized swimming pools. The basin is designed to handle storms and excessive rain, which can overwhelm treatment centres and cause contaminated water to run off from farmers’ fields and other areas along the riverbank.
But weeks of testing have shown that levels of E. coli and enterococci, an intestinal bacteria, have fluctuated wildly and soared as high as 10 times above the allowable limits some days this spring.
Aurélie Merle, Paris 2024′s executive director of sports, said the most recent testing showed results between 980 and 1,553 colony-forming units per 100 millilitres of water. The World Triathlon standard is 1,000 CFU per 100 millilitres. One result was below the threshold and two were above, Merle said.
The main problem for organizers has been the steady rainfall last Friday and Saturday. Merle said Paris received a full month of rain in just 36 hours last weekend.
Visitors refresh in a fountain during a hot day on July 30, 2024, in Paris, France.Siegfried Modola/The Globe and Mail
While the weather in Paris has turned hot and sunny, storm showers have been forecast for Tuesday evening. Merle said officials were working with weather forecasters to get the most updated information. “Because we’re not talking only about it’s raining, but where it is raining exactly, so that we know and we can assess the impact on the river,” she told a news conference Tuesday. She added that the hot weather should help kill bacteria in the water.
“We know that the sun and the heat have a very strong impact on the quality of the water, and that’s why we feel, because we were so close this morning, that we can hopefully believe that tomorrow morning the water quality will be better,” she said.
Casado defended the decision to move to a duathlon as a last resort, even though it could benefit athletes who are stronger in cycling and running. She said that has become fairly common in the sport and noted that the swim leg at the European Championships in June had to be scrapped because of weather.
“In the last five years especially, unfortunately, we have to change to duathlon before cancelling the event. Because if we cancel the event there are no medals,” she said. “This is a part of our adaptation to the climate change that we are facing in this moment.”
If the event does go ahead Wednesday, the later start time for the men could also have an impact on the athletes because of the hot weather. The race is scheduled to start at 10:45 a.m. local time (4:45 a.m. ET), and the temperature could be above 30 C by the time the athletes reach the running leg.
Gergely Markus, World Triathlon’s sport director, said officials are monitoring the weather and that so far the forecast is within the sport’s guidelines. They do plan to take extra precautions such as adding more water stations.
Canada has three athletes competing in triathlon: Tyler Mislawchuk and Charles Paquet in the men’s event, and Emy Legault in the women’s.
“In an outdoor sport, schedules change. This is not new to us,” said Phil Dunne, Triathlon Canada’s high-performance director. “We also recognize that in any open-water swimming event there are uncontrollable variables and athlete safety must always come first. We trust World Triathlon and Paris 2024 to make the right call for the integrity of the competition and health of all of the athletes.”
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