As nearly 10,500 athletes from 184 countries floated down the Seine River in the pouring rain during the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics at the end of last week, American sports commentator Mike Tirico announced that the E.coli levels in the famous river were "too high" for swimmers to compete in had events been scheduled to take place that day.
Paris knew the Seine would pose some serious health risks—the river has been illegal to swim in for over 100 years. After a spring with an abnormal amount of rainfall, tests of the river's water found that the levels of E. coli bacteria were more than 20 times higher than what World Triathlon considers acceptable. But the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, still jumped into the Seine earlier this month in an effort to instill confidence that the waterway was just fine. But a small dip is very different from submerging yourself for hours of racing.
Paris hasn't hosted the Olympics in 100 years, and the largest investment the city made for this global event was not a new stadium or sports arena but a $1.5 billion underground tunnel and water storage facility meant to purify the Seine for the triathlon and open-water swimming races. And if this fancy new system designed to clean one of the dirtiest rivers in the world didn't work? Well, Paris didn't feel the need to come up with a plan b other than postponing and possibly changing the triathlon to a duathlon.