Paris Olympics 2024: Seine River unfit for swimming one month before Games, tests show

The river Seine is still failing water quality tests one month before the Paris Olympics when it is scheduled to host the open-water swimming competition and the swimming leg of the triathlon, results showed on Friday.

The latest tests, completed last week and released by the Paris mayor’s office, showed levels of the E coli bacteria – an indicator of faecal matter – are far above the upper limits imposed by sports federations.

On June 18, the level of E coli was 10 times acceptable levels and at no point did it fall below the upper limit of 1,000 colony-forming units per 100 millilitres (cfu/ml) used by the World Triathlon Federation.

The readings for enterococci bacteria were better, but they were still at unsafe levels for three of the seven days of last week.

“Water quality remains degraded because of unfavourable hydrological conditions, little sunshine, below-average seasonal temperatures and upstream pollution,” the mayor’s office said in a statement.

French authorities have spent 1.4 billion euros (US$1.5 billion) in the last decade trying to clean up the river by improving the Paris sewerage system, as well as building new water treatment and storage facilities.