The rains that fell on Friday and Saturday in Paris soiled the Seine for the next few hours, forcing the organizers to cancel the triathlon training planned for Sunday morning in the river, but they remain “confident” that the events will take place on Tuesday and Wednesday.
The triathlon is the first Olympic event to be held in the Seine, before open water swimming in the second week of the Paris Olympics.
On the night of Saturday to Sunday, the Olympic organizing committee, the International Triathlon Federation, as well as local authorities, took the “joint decision to cancel the swimming part of the triathlon familiarization” scheduled for Sunday, because the “water levels do not provide sufficient guarantees”, they indicated in a press release.
On Saturday afternoon, the organizers had already warned that the previous day’s deluge, some 16 mm of water, was likely to degrade the quality of the water.
– “Athletes’ Health” –
They did not specify on Sunday the rate of E.Coli and enterococci bacteria which must be below a certain threshold, but put forward “the priority of the health of the athletes”.
Asked by AFP, the deputy mayor of Paris for the Olympic Games and the Seine, Pierre Rabadan, indicated that the “exceeding” of the thresholds was not “very significant”.
The Austerlitz basin, a major structure of the Bathing Plan which receives rainwater and wastewater to prevent it from being discharged into the Seine, “operated at around 20% of its maximum capacity”, he also indicated.
Thanks to the Bathing Plan, for which the State and the Paris region’s local authorities have injected 1.4 billion euros since 2016, “there have been discharges into the Seine and the Marne but they have been limited,” added Prefect Pierre-Antoine Molina.
“Fifteen to 20 mm on Friday and 10 mm more on Saturday, that’s the equivalent of about 15 days of precipitation in a normal July,” stressed this representative of the regional prefecture.
The time needed to return to acceptable levels “depends on many parameters” but “an improvement will occur in the next few days,” he assured.
For their part, Paris 2024 and World Triathlon said they were “confident that water quality will return below the limits before the start of triathlon competitions on July 30”, and this “given the weather forecast for the next 48 hours”.
“We are not particularly worried,” reacted the president of the organizing committee Tony Estanguet on Sunday morning, interviewed from the riding site in Versailles. “We have until Friday to organize, so we have a few days of margin,” he added.
– Return of the sun –
Due to heavy rains, the water in the Seine had been of poor quality for much of June, making it unsuitable for swimming. However, water quality analyses were recently within health standards six days out of seven from July 17 to 23.
On July 17, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who promised Parisians that they would be able to swim in the river next summer, and the president of the organizing committee Tony Estanguet took a dip to set an example.
The results of water analyses released on Friday showed that on that day, the level of E.Coli was close to the threshold of international federations for competitions, but exceeded that of swimming for the general public.
The regional prefecture told AFP that it had received a positive opinion from the Regional Health Agency based on the latest results known at that time.
The thresholds set by the European directive apply “for public bathing” and not “for a competition or an event”, as in the case of the 17th, reacted Prefect Molina.
The sun returned to the French capital this Sunday morning.
The U.S. triathlon team showed confidence on Saturday.
“We have a really good chance of doing the full triathlon,” said U.S. Triathlon Team High Performance Director Scott Schnitzspahn.
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