France spared blushes after Seine passes clean water test

PARIS : Olympians dived into the River Seine on Wednesday after a pre-dawn notice informed teams that its murky waters were at last safe enough to proceed with the triathlon, sparing France the embarrassment of a central Paris 2024 promise being swept away.

The pledge had been that the river would be transformed from a waterway frequently laden with sewage to one clean enough to swim in. Authorities spent 1.4 billion euros ($1.5 million) modernising the capital's antiquated sanitation works.

But the torrential rains that soaked the Games' opening ceremony and the first day of sport raised the levels of bacteria in the river beyond safe levels, forcing the repeated postponement of the men's triathlon until Wednesday and raising questions over the efficacy of the works.

"Here we are!" President Emmanuel Macron exclaimed on X. "In the space of 4 years, we've achieved something that hasn't been possible in 100 years: the Seine is now swimmable."

The women were the first to take the plunge in a triathlon - which includes swimming, cycling and running - that would be won by home favourite Cassandre Beaugrand. Soon later, it was the men's turn to leap off the floating pontoon underneath the Alexandre III bridge, near Napoleon's tomb.

The ambitious infrastructure works had included digging new pipes to houses and houseboats that once pumped raw sewage into the river, additional treatment plants and a cavernous reservoir underneath the capital's Gare d'Austerlitz.

Able to hold 46,000 cubic metres of runoff water during a storm, it was designed to prevent the runoff water mixing with untreated sewage and flowing into the Seine.

Wednesday morning's test results showed that the concentration of the E.Coli and Enterococcus faecalis bacteria