Paris Olympics 2024: Triathlon postponed over Seine River contamination concerns

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PARIS — Just hours before the men's triathlon race was scheduled to begin on Tuesday morning, Olympic organizers, World Triathlon officials and City of Paris representatives jointly decided to postpone the race over concerns about the quality of water in the Seine River.

The race, scheduled to start at 8 a.m. Paris time, has been pushed to Wednesday at 10:45 a.m. The women's race, scheduled for 8 a.m. Wednesday, is still scheduled to run at that time. The race could also be pushed to Friday, Aug. 2 if necessary.

The city of Paris has spent $1.5 billion to clean the Seine, long derided as filthy and inhospitable. After several weeks of increasingly promising samples, the triathlon appeared on schedule to run as normal. But heavy rains on Friday and Saturday which dampened the Opening Ceremony also affected the content of the river, and clearly the sampling returned just hours before the race was not clean enough for organizers' satisfaction.

More than a century ago, the Seine was used for a range of water events at the 1900 Olympics in Paris. But a combination of terrible sewage treatment practices, industrial growth and municipal mismanagement combined to render the river unsuitable for humans.

But the city invested in a range of cleanup efforts and programs designed to treat the water on a daily basis while halting the sources of pollution. Houseboats on the river are required to tap into municipal sewage systems, and untreated sewage no longer flows directly into the river.

“It took a lot of effort to go cut the sources of the pollution at the root, but it’s a very serious piece of work,” Paris 2024 director of sustainability Georgina Grenon told Yahoo Sports in March. “I think everyone’s going to be thrilled about that.”

On the whole, yes. But specifically, many in Paris weren't thrilled about the extent of the cost — they mounted colorful protests to critique the government's spending priorities — and triathletes have expressed both concern and frustration about the cleanup process.

Team USA marathon swimmer Katie Grimes conceded earlier this summer that she was concerned about the quality of the water in the Seine. “Yeah, for sure,” Grimes told Yahoo Sports. “We were supposed to have an Olympic test event there last summer, and that got canceled.”

Now, organizers and triathletes will just have to wait and hope. A newly constructed 46,000-cubic-meter storage basin near the Austerlitz train station was designed to catch rainwater, but clearly the weekend's massive storms overwhelmed its capacity. Organizers are hopeful that Tuesday's sunny weather will help improve the river's quality, but there is a chance of showers around midnight Paris time, with more rain potentially rolling in on Wednesday morning.

If and when the Olympic triathlon does go off, it will include a 1.5-kilometer (.93 mile) swim, a 40-kilometer (24.8-mile) bike ride, and a 10-kilometer (6.2-mile) run. The triathletes will begin their swim at the Pont Alexander III bridge, will swim two laps — upstream and counterclockwise — and will climb 32 stairs up to the top of the bridge to start the bike ride through the streets of Paris, then finish with a run.

There is no backup swimming plan other than delaying the race; if the river continues to prove unsafe, the swimming portion of the triathlon will be canceled. The men's and women's marathon swimming is still scheduled for Aug. 7 and 8.