Flushing Taxpayer Money: Paris’s Socialist Mayor Failed to Clean the Seine for Olympic Swimming

It was supposed to be a symbolic triumph of environmentalism and good government. Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo swam in the Seine on July 17 to demonstrate the water was safe. It has been illegal to swim in the polluted river for a century, so Paris invested $1.5 billion in clean-up efforts to prepare it for open-water Olympic swimming events.

“With the Games just nine days away, on the kind of perfect Paris morning that inspires wonder, Ms. Hidalgo, a socialist who has pursued the ecological transformation of the city, stepped down into the murky river that will be a focal point of the Olympics,” the New York Times reported.

“After years of promises and more than $1 billion of investment, Paris’s once-filthy river is finally swimmable. And the mayor proved it just days before the July 26 Olympic deadline,” reported NPR.

“The cleaning of the Seine also helps to burnish Paris’s brand as a new capital of sustainability — a place where cars and tarmac are ceding space to bikes, pedestrians and trees — right when all eyes are on it,” an article in Bloomberg said.

“Anne Hidalgo’s dip in the Seine is undoubtedly one of the most anticipated events of the last few weeks,” said an article in Vogue. “Taking place just nine days before the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, the Mayor of Paris’ swim put an end to numerous slanders and, above all, testified a significant advance for ecology.”

“The Seine quality is perfect,” said Paris 2024 Olympic president Tony Estanguet.

Then, on Saturday, it was revealed that the Seine quality was not perfect when Hidalgo swam in the river. “Tests by monitoring group Eau de Paris show that at the Bras Marie, E. coli levels were then above the safe limit of 900 colony-forming units per 100 milliliters determined by European rules on July 17, when the mayor took a dip,” the Associated Press reported.

Triathlon training sessions were canceled on Sunday and on Monday because E. coli levels were too high. And now the Olympics has announced that the men’s triathlon, scheduled for this morning, has been postponed.

In reality, it was always unclear whether the Seine would be safe for Olympic events. The level of E. coli varies widely depending on rainfall. “The most recent published monitoring report, from testing conducted July 17 through 23, showed that E. coli levels spiked at the Pont Alexandre III bridge, where athletes are meant to start and finish the individual triathlon events, after a day of heavy rain on July 20,” reported NBC News.

But now Paris has spent $1.5 billion, more than it spent on any other single project to prepare for the Olympics, for a river that still isn’t safe to swim in. Natalie Dowzicky at Reason wonders whether that was a good use of French taxpayers’ money.

“Time and again countries prioritize the picturesque or television-friendly venues without considering the very real health risks that are present in many of the world’s famous waterways,” Dowzicky writes. In 2016 in Rio de Janeiro and in 2021 in Tokyo, swimmers competed near sewage runoff. Dowzicky notes that athletes are compensating for Paris’s failure by guzzling probiotics, and American triathlete Seth Rider thinks he can increase his tolerance of E. coli by not washing his hands after using the bathroom.

The Seine cleanup was supposed to be a key part of Hidalgo’s socialist environmental agenda. “When the current mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, presented her winning bid for the 2024 Games back in 2016, she promised that the city, home to 11 million people in the greater urban area, would undergo a drastic environmental upgrade by 2024,” Time reported in 2023. “From 2015, we decided we were going to take advantage of the Olympic Games to considerably accelerate the vision,” Paris deputy mayor Emmanuel Grégoire said in that story. “It was a really important part of the candidacy.”

Now it’s an example of environmentalist hubris powered by gobs of money and boosted by fawning press diving head-first into stone-cold reality.