French President Emmanuel Macron, who has repeatedly promised to swim in the Seine at the Olympics, said on Tuesday that the river was becoming “cleaner.”
Mr Macron was reacting after Sports Minister Amélie-Oudea Castella unveiled a stormwater treatment facility for the River Marne, which flows into the Seine just east of Paris.
She declared that ensuring the two rivers were suitable for swimming was “one of the challenges of this century”.
President Macron expressed satisfaction with this “important step towards making the Seine swimmable” on his X account.
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“The water in the Seine will be cold…but clean,” he wrote. We will confirm this individually.
The Olympic open water race and triathlon swim will be held along a scenic river in central Paris, where bacteria levels in the city exceeded safe maximums last summer.
The cleanliness of a river is greatly influenced by the weather. Heavy rains wash pollutants down levees and back into drains and drains into rivers.
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A rainstorm that occurs right before the event could lead to the postponement or cancellation of the Olympics.
At the opening on Tuesday, Udea Castella pointed out that there are 94 days left until the Olympics.
“We're ready to go on time,” she said. “We are ready to live up to our legacy.”
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Val-de-Marne president Olivier Capitaniou said the Marne plant was designed to purify water and could process “the equivalent of an Olympic swimming pool per hour.”
The giant overflow water cistern in Austerlitz, on the eastern edge of central Paris, is designed to hold the equivalent of 20 Olympic swimming pools.
Measures to clean the two rivers should allow local residents to bathe in the rivers, something that has not been possible in the Marne since 1970 and in the Seine since 1923.
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Macron is not the first French leader to say he wants to make the Seine clean enough to bathe in.
In 1990, when he was mayor of Paris before becoming president, Jacques Chirac promised the river would be suitable for swimming “soon” and said he planned to take a dip to celebrate. He never did.
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