Olympic swimmers finally returned to the cleaned-up river Seine for the first time since 1900 for the men’s and women’s triathlons races—and the first reviews are in.
“It didn’t taste great,” New Zealand racer Ainsley Thorpe told The Wall Street Journal. “It’s a little bit brown.”
Torrential rains over the weekend had swept tons of wastewater and sewage into the river, overloading a $1.5 billion system to keep the waterway clean.
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Triathletes were then unable to familiarize themselves with the course, with training runs canceled for several days because of high bacteria levels, shown by daily testing for E. coli and enteroccus. It wasn’t until dawn on Wednesday that they got the go-ahead to race in the murky and still-swollen river despite more rainstorms overnight.
“Hopefully it’s all right because I think I swallowed, like, a liter of water,” American racer Seth Rider told the Journal. His teammate Taylor Spivey had prepared for the worst. “I’ve taken lots of probiotics in the last month,” she said.
The fact that organizers were able to run the triathlon, and not be forced to hold only a duathlon, will come as a relief to Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who has made cleaning up the Seine a pet project and who took a much-publicized dip in the river two weeks ago with 100 city officials to show that the clean-up was working.
The nightmare scenario—swimmers vomiting en masse after ingesting the polluted river water—was avoided, although one Canadian competitor, Tyler Mislawchuk, was captured by the TV cameras vomiting copiously after crossing the finish line.
The hometown favorite who won the women’s race, Cassandre Beaugrand, was also sick—but out of nerves at the start, before she even dived into the river.
“This morning, I was in total panic. I vomited before the start,” the 27-year-old told reporters, according to Reuters. “It was nerves, it’s never happened to me before, and in front of the other athletes. Everyone knew I was stressed. It’s not what you want to do.”
Read it at The Wall Street Journal
