Paris mayor’s Seine dip postponed to mid-July

Initially, Anne Hidalgo was supposed to perform a swimming session in the river to demonstrate its clean quality

Well, at the end the much-awaited fulfilment of Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo’s promised swim in the Seine won’t take place this month, even though it was initially set to happen either 23 or 30 June. The new proposal is that the mayor will still take a dip in the river to demonstrate its viability and safety for swimming, however, it will occur somewhere in the week of 15 July, that is the week preceding the official opening of the 2024 Olympic Games.

The official reason for the postponement, according to Inside the Games, was due to the snap legislative elections which were called in by President Macron for 30 June and 7 July.

The PR stunt that the mayor will do is so that the officials will demonstrate to the public and the world that their grand-scale and rather expensive efforts linked to cleaning up the Seine have given fruit making the river once again swimmable 101 years after that kind of leisure activity was officially banned there.

How clean is the Seine?

Well, soon we’ll all know whether the efforts have been successful. However, analyses done in April pointed to a situation that was still dire.

The Surfrider Foundation claimed to have analysed laboratory tests and concluded that the water in the Seine, which stretches nearly 800 kilometres across France, remains contaminated and potentially dangerous in the Paris area, where the Olympic swimming events will be held.

The whole thing is taken as a joke and also with a sense of disbelief by many Parisians who think that the 1.4 billion euros spent to make the river dubiously swimmable could have been spent on things like improving the public transport system, for example