“Paris” wants people to swim in the Seine once again

Due to the high level of water pollution, swimming in it has been banned since 1923, but in recent decades the local government has invested large sums of money in order to clean it. The current administration has a very ambitious goal: clearing the Seine River by 2024 to make it suitable for swimming. The Summer Olympics will take place in Paris this year.

The Paris 2024 Organizing Committee recently announced that the Senate will be at the center of the entire event, starting with the opening ceremony of the Games.

In fact, the ceremony is not expected to take place in a stadium, as usual, but along the river with a length of about 6 kilometers, starting from the Austerlitz bridge to the Eiffel Tower.

According to the plan, on the evening of July 26, 2024, 160 boats with more than 10 thousand athletes from all over the world will pass near Notre Dame Cathedral and the Louvre Museum, welcoming the 600 thousand spectators who will see the parade from different points along the river .

The organizers also aim for the Olympic Games in open water swimming and triathlon – which includes swimming, cycling and running – to take place in the Seine, as it did at the Paris Olympics in 1900. The idea is that after the Games river to be once again suitable for swimming.

In 1990, the then mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, said on television that after several years of the river being considered biologically dead, 25 different species of fish have been found in the Seine. Chirac, who had previously been prime minister and later president, added that for three years he would bathe in the river “in front of witnesses” to prove once again that the Senate had become a real river.

His words at the time were greeted by the program audience with a smirk, but the idea of ​​making Senna suitable for swimming continued to be considered by subsequent administrations as well.

top channel