Paris has suffered a setback in its race to clean up the Seine in time for next year’s Olympic Games after the river was declared too dirty for an international competition, reports The Times.
The women’s event in the Open Water Swimming World Cup, which was due to be held on Saturday, was postponed for at least a day because sewage had washed into the river during heavy rain. A practice swim in the Seine on Friday was cancelled altogether.
The World Cup is widely viewed as a trial run for the Olympics, when a 10km swimming race is due to be held in the Seine in the centre of Paris.
Events were held in the Seine in 1900, when Paris staged the Olympics for the first time, but officials made it illegal to swim in the river 23 years later as pollution intensified.
The award of the 2024 Olympics to the city prompted the authorities to spend €1.4 billion on work designed to make it safe for swimming once more, including €300 million on a 9km long, 3m diameter conduit to carry sewage to a treatment station.
Pierre-Antoine Molina, general-secretary for public policy in the Paris region, insisted the work was going to plan: “We carried out 42 tests between June 6 and July 18 and we registered an improvement in the quality of the water.”