It is important to remember the darker side of the Olympic games - where there is delight, celebration and goodwill for humankind, the cost is paid by our environment.
Swimming in the Seine had been banned in Paris since 1923. Yet this summer, the public will be officially invited to take a dip in the river at select locations.
Eight years after Paris officials resolved to take action on the pollution of the Seine, an Olympic catalyst put those plans into true effect with a formidable €1.5-billion-dollar cost to the city.
The use of the Seine for some races resulted in some Olympians with serious health complaints, with some even suffering hospitalisation. This, and the costs, has led critics to ask - was the clean-up of the Paris river worthwhile?
Pollution
The ambitious finances have been focused on reducing the adverse effects of Paris’ previous drainage system, which disposed of both household waste and run-off rainwater as one.
At times of heavy rainfall, this excess water invaded the Seine, creating a breeding-ground for pollution. Despite the construction of a 5.7-mile sewer, alongside financial incentives working to encourage 10,000 rural households to divert their toilet waste to the independent sewer system, by the beginnings of July 2024, these efforts already appeared to be defective.
New canal swimming spots have faced temporary closure due to bacteria detection: if $1.5 billion cannot make the Seine safe for swimming, is this an instance of money being just washed down the river?
Despite the colossal expense, on the 30 July 2024, when the Olympic men’s individual triathlon was expected to take place, tests demonstrated that water quality did not meet an acceptable standard. E. coli bacteria was located at 4 points along the 1500m course.
The safe limit for E. coli, a bacterium whose symptoms range from diarrhea and cramps to occasional fever, is 900cfu (colony-forming units) per 100ml. However, in the Seine, the readings ranged up to 1500cfu per 100ml. This was largely due to heavy rain causing increased pollution in the river.
Suffering
The men’s race was postponed until the 31 July, the same day as the women’s. Whether this was a positive or not may be up for dispute. Belgium’s Jolien Vermeylen, finishing in 24th place in the women’s race, claimed to have felt ‘unthinkable things’ in the water.
American Seth Rider claimed he had been trying to increase his E. coli exposure and resistance in preparation for the race. Following the races, Canadian Tyler Mislawchuk fell immediately ill.
Several athletes collapsed upon finishing. It is undetermined as to whether bacteria in the Seine were the cause of these afflictions, yet the abundance of instances strongly suggest the $1.5 billion expense to have been futile.
Not only have these instances raised concerns regarding the athlete’s welfare, but they also throw into doubt the success of the transformation of the Seine.
Throughout the duration of the Olympic games, the effects on the swimmers only became more pronounced. Planned practice sessions for marathon swimmers were cancelled on 6th August, due to elevated readings of enterococci bacteria, yet the hit-and-miss approach taken led to the suffering of several.
It is important to remember the darker side of the Olympic games - where there is delight, celebration and goodwill for humankind, the cost is paid by our environment.
Dramatic
For example, Belgium’s Claire Michael was hospitalized after a bacterial infection of E. coli, resulting in her team withdrawing from the mixed relay.
Bettina Fabian of Hungary "couldn’t really focus on the race" - the hurried detoxification of the Seine meant that many of the athletes had to remain intent on not swallowing the water, rather than on the medals.
While only a few of the practice sessions were given the green light, all races went ahead, perhaps indicating that the government spending was more to propagate the successes of their environmental agenda than to achieve an enduring positive impact on the Seine’s water quality.
If this project had truly been about the environmental outcomes, athletes’ welfare would have been prioritized over the attempt to brand the Seine as swimmable. Perhaps the clean-up of the Seine partook in its’ own race- against the arrival of the global media.
The swimmers remain generally divided on the Seine’s water quality. Silver medalist, Moesha Johnson, claims "it’s always going to be dramatic (in the media)",’whereas German Leonie Beck revealed she vomited ‘9 times,’ which she blames directly on the river.
Cost
However, the Paris organising committee have stated that they were ‘not aware of any established link between the illness and the Seine’s water quality,’ claiming that across all four testing points on the day, water quality had been well within thresholds established by World Aquatics.
Masked beneath the global sensation of the Paris Olympics, the government of Paris had other fish to fry.
Another, arguably more long-term motive behind the cleansing of the Seine was to revive aquatic life, which suffered to the point at which in the 1970s, only four species of fish were recorded in the city. The Olympic accelerator has ensured that there are now 36 different fish species living in the Seine.
Likewise, there has been a significant effort to restore natural conditions on the riverbank through replanting vegetation and the reintroduction of native species including salmon and eel.
On the other hand, fish were not the only visitors expected in the river. The people of Paris assert that money should have been spent on reducing the high cost of living crisis that citizens experience, which amounts to an average monthly cost of 1,226.3 euros per person.
Priority
In fact, people pledged to ‘poo en masse’ into the Seine as a form of protest against the expense, using the hashtag ‘IPooInTheSeine’.
This attempted sabotage of environmental success serves to demonstrate that the Seine may not have been the most pressing issue that the city faced: the people were willing to use their protest as self-harm, to question the imbalance of resources received by the Seine in the face of the Olympics.
This is implicative of the cultural incentive motivating this scheme- it acted as a prime opportunity to use the Olympics to advertise Paris to the world.
It could be noticed that other green schemes in Paris have become relatively small-scale in comparison to the effort that has gone into the Seine, such as a $110 million scheme in 2024 for replanting hedgerows.
If the clean-up of the Seine is not kept up after the Olympics, has the money been wasted at the expense of other high priority issues?
Scale
It should also be taken into consideration that the giant wastewater storage tank, built near Austerlitzstation, had the intention of being used as a rainwater buffer, however the fluctuating bacteria in the Seine has been the indisputable result of high levels of rainfall.
While it was undoubtably imperative to decontaminate the Seine, the lack of funding towards other environmental campaigns suggests that green policies may only be prioritized when they can be propagated under the branding of a separate issue; in this case the need for the Seine to be used for the Olympics.
If the Seine can be taken as an example, there are troubling implications for the advancement of other green agendas which do not have the same propaganda incentive.
Despite this, there could be cautious optimism about this project.
The capital of Denmark, Copenhagen, has extremely clean water quality, however as recently as 1995, the same issues as in the Seine were rampant. The government investment of around $440 million utilized overflow barriers and underground storage barriers.
Therefore, taking into consideration the scale of the investment in Paris, the long-term revival of the Seine should be possible.
Welfare
Alongside this, the several rivers in Copenhagen are much shorter than the Seine, with the longest only covering 7.5km, which suggests that for a long-term, sustainable clean-up of the Seine to be a success, the seemingly extreme expense may be unavoidable.
Pierre Rabadan, Paris’s deputy mayor for sports, has claimed that the Olympic games have acted as an ‘accelerator’ for the clean-up of the Seine, which officially began in 2016.
This raises the complication of whether the effort will be maintained now that the games are over. Will the loss of media attention have an adverse effect on the Seine?
Is there a reason that it has taken a global event for the Seine to be truly prioritised? If funding for the scheme had been more deliberately applied a few years ago, it is likely that the concern over athletes’ welfare would not have existed for the 2024 Olympics.
Benefits
Perhaps the people’s protest in Paris can tell us something about this: green issues are taken at surface level, unless a cultural incentive comes into play.
Regardless of the reasoning, it is true that Paris committed to a climate-positive Olympics: the greenest in Olympic history. Steps taken involved doubling the amount of plant-based food served at the athletes’ village, alongside the use of solar panels.
While the emissions halved from previous Olympic games, with an estimated 1.75 million tonnes of CO2 compared to Tokyo 2020’s 3.5 million tonnes, it is undeniable that this amount of pollution is unsustainable in the long-term.
It is important to remember the darker side of the Olympic games - where there is delight, celebration and goodwill for humankind, the cost is paid by our environment.
Only time will tell whether the legacy of the 2024 Paris Olympics has managed to alter the Olympics’ poor relationship with the environment: beginning with whether the Seine, and therefore the entire city’s population, benefits.
This Author
Imogen Wellings is a student at The College of Richard Collyer in Sussex. She is soon to study English literature at Warwick University with a view to career in journalism. She is particularly concerned with carbon emissions and securing funding for green policy.
The College of Richard Collyer is a sixth-form college in West Sussex whose English department has run a competition through the 2024-25 academic year in partnership with The Ecologist online, open to all upper-sixth students, to develop their journalistic skills by exploring environmental interests and concerns.
