British Triathlon confident France will deliver safe Seine for Games

PARIS : British Triathlon has a been-there, done-that attitude when it comes to water quality issues in the leadup to big competitions and trusts French authorities to deliver a safe Olympics amid concerns about pollution levels in the River Seine.

The triathlon and open-water swimming competitions at the Paris Olympics take place in the Seine and Games organisers have come under fire for refusing to organise a plan B if heavy rain makes the river, which relies on a newly built storage basin to help reduce the risks of pollution, unsuitable for swimming.

Rather than an alternative location, organisers have contingency days for the open-water swimming and triathlon events, allowing them to reshuffle the schedule if necessary.

"Every single Olympic Games, Paralympic Games we've been to, there is usually something environmentally and usually water-related that we're dealing with," Mike Cavendish, director performance at British Triathlon, told Reuters.

"So, in Tokyo, it was all about the heat of the water. There were water quality issues in Rio. So this isn't new for us. And everywhere we go outside of the Olympic and Paralympic Games again, we are almost always dealing with something in the natural world that means that, environmentally, we've got some challenges.

"But we are perfectly comfortable that as far as we're concerned, the authorities have done about as good a job, I think, as they possibly could have done to this point. And we'll be ready to go there, regardless of whether it ends up being a duathlon or a triathlon, and what the water quality might be."

Earlier this year, the Surfrider Foundation, a non-profit organisation whose purpose is to "protect and showcase the importance of lakes, rivers, the ocean, waves,