Paris mayor confident River Seine's water quality good enough for Olympic swimming

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Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo said she was confident water quality in the River Seine will be up to Olympic standards this summer — and that she’ll be able to prove it by swimming there, possibly alongside President Emmanuel Macron.

The Seine is the venue for marathon swimming at the Games and the swimming leg of the Olympic and Paralympic triathlons.

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Asked Tuesday about whether she’ll meet her promise to swim in the Seine before the Games, Hidalgo said "for sure, because water quality will be good."

For decades, the Seine was too toxic for most fish and for swimmers, useful mainly as a waterway to transport goods and people or as a watery grave for discarded bicycles and other trash. Swimming in the Seine has, with some exceptions, been illegal since 1923.

Hidalgo mentioned new facilities that have been specially built to clean up the river, whose water quality was recently denounced by an environmental group.

A water treatment plant in Champigny-sur-Marne, east of Paris, was inaugurated Tuesday.

Competitors swim in the Seine River during the Paris Triathlon competition in Paris on Sunday, July 10, 2011. Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo said on Tuesday, April 23, 2024, she was confident water quality will be up to Olympic standards this summer. (AP Photo/Lionel Cironneau)

Next week will see the official opening of a huge storage basin meant to reduce the need to spill bacteria-laden wastewater into the Seine untreated when it rains. The giant hole dug next to Paris’ Austerlitz train station will hold the equivalent of 20 Olympic swimming pools of dirty water that will